The feelgood festival

Published on Wednesday 30 September 2009 20:55

A WORTHY sounding celebration of mental well-being has entered its third year in rude good health, finds Sue Wilson

ANY branding consultant even putatively worth their fee would surely throw their hands up in despair. The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival: doesn't the very name connote an earnestly and thus drearily worthy affair, the kind that makes valiant attempts to convince the wider public of its relevance and interest, but from which your average punters inevitably stay away in their droves?

Evidently not. In only its third year, the festival has grown from an initial 40 events in 2007, largely centred on Glasgow, to a three-week, Scotland-wide line-up of nearly 200, across art forms including film, music, theatre, dance, literature, comedy, painting and photography, staged in many of the country's leading venues as well as numerous local and community spaces.

"The first time round, we really didn't know who the audience would be," acknowledges festival director Lee Knifton. "It was like when you have a party and worry that no-one's going to come.

"But right from the start we've found a real appetite among a very wide range of people for the type of events we're putting on."

Knifton's primary interpretation of that appeal, and the basis of his approach to programming the festival, both highlights and subverts the negative perceptions that surround its core theme.

"We all have mental health," he points out. "Whether it's good or it's something we struggle with, it is an issue that's relevant to everyone. That's what enables the festival to be celebratory as well as exploratory or challenging, because we're looking at the whole spectrum of mental health, including what make us feel good or increases our well-being as well as the more adverse aspects."

To promote this emphasis on states of health rather than illness, this year's event has been preceded by a publicity campaign encouraging people to feed into the programme by nominating their favourite feelgood films and songs – albeit the organisers' definition of such positivity reaches wider than the conventional.

"When things are marketed as 'feelgood', it's usually meant in a pretty shallow way," says the festival's film programmer Belinda Arthur. "We've tried to get across that it doesn't have to mean escapism – it could be something that resonates powerfully with your own experience, or it could be a really inspiring, tour-de-force performance. And people have really responded to that – we've ended up with a real mix. Some people even suggested horror films, for instance, because they were so well produced, or the acting was so good."

The movie line-up thus includes not only the likes of ET, Amlie, and The Blues Brothers but such seemingly darker fare as Kes, Orphans and Brazil.

"We're also trying to promote the idea of cinema in general as a means towards positive mental health," Arthur continues. "There's been some interesting evidence from the Film Council of a big rise in cinema attendance during the recession, which suggests people do see it as an accessible and relatively affordable way of making themselves feel better. And during the 1930s Depression, even though the studios were churning out all these romantic, fairytale-type films, the ones that actually did best at the box-office were the ones about people down on their luck; struggling in ways with which the audience could identify."

Another film strand takes its title from the second transaction famously cited by Marilyn Monroe regarding the movie business: "Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul."

It celebrates the work of five screen legends – Monroe, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich – while exploring their often uneasy relationship with the demands of celebrity.

"It's partly to examine how Hollywood tried to shape them into its mould, and how they resisted," Arthur explains. "I also hope it will encourage the audience to think about how we relate to fame today: the whole trend of young people saying their ambition is to be famous, in the belief that this would solve all their problems, whereas these women's experience show how fame often made their lives much more difficult."

Issues of gender and mental health also extend into the theatre programme, where shows include Rona Munro's new version of Lorca's classic The House of Bernarda Alba, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, and The YelloWing, a contemporary reworking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist parable, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Musical highlights include two major gigs under the title of Music Like a Vitamin, featuring the likes of Emma Pollock, Karine Polwart, James Yorkston, Attic Lights, Norman Blake and Frightened Rabbit, performing in various specially devised collaborations, while on the comedy front Phil Kay hosts a night's celebration of the human mind, in all its strangeness and wonder.

"The festival is basically about the arts' unique ability to engage people with challenging issues at an emotional level, and to explore those issues in a sensitive and complex way," Knifton says.

"Just as basically, though, it's about putting on great arts events that the public wants to come to."

&#149 The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival runs from today until 22 October. For a full programme, visit www.mhfestival.com.