Coming to DVD tomorrow, Wednesday, January 30: KINGS PARK
Lucy Winer’s personal exploration of America’s mental health care system premiered at Woodstock in 2011. Other screenings have included Stony Brook, Film Columbia, and Hamptons Take 2, as well as numerous mental health conferences, academic, and institutional appearances.
In 1967, as a teenager, Winer was committed to Long Island’s Kings Park State Hospital. Half a century later, she returned to the now-shuttered institution to face the traumas of her past. In the process, Winer expands beyond her own story to reveal those of other former residents, employees, and Kings Park itself, crafting a record of not only her own experience of mental illness, but of how mental health care has changed – and faltered – in the decades since her treatment. Deftly balancing the personal and the public, Winer allows the viewer to experience the decrepit yet still foreboding building where she was locked away, and to share in others’ troubling memories of their own or their loved ones’ incarceration, offering these reflections as a means to make sense of how we as a society deal with mental health. As a result, the documentary becomes a powerful tool that not only provides a catharsis for anyone who has been touched by similar experiences, but also presents an opportunity to explore and debate the current state of treatment.
what (not) to doc 