Lecturer’s “epic and intimate” film tours global festivals

A Goldsmiths, University of London lecturer’s “gripping and tender” documentary Dead When I Got Here, about a mental asylum run by its inmates, is continuing its global screening tour after winning the jury award at the Scottish Mental Health Film and Arts Festival and receiving a Special Mention at Docs DF in Mexico.

 

Watch Dead When I Got Here on Monday 30 November, Media Research Building, Screen 1, 5pm. Free and open to all.

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Associate Lecturer Mark Aitken (Department of Media and Communications) produced and filmed Dead When I Got Here over four years and edited it in his office on our New Cross campus. 

Based in Mexico, the film follows Josué who, six years ago, was infested with gangrene and unable to walk. Deranged and malnourished, his body and mind had been broken by decades of drug abuse. Police cast him out of the deadly streets of Juárez into the desert and dumped him in an asylum run by its own patients.

When Mark meets him, he’s managing the facility, having discovered compassion in his darkest hours and formed a new family among the asylum’s 120 residents. Josué’s daughter in Los Angeles, who thought her father dead, is reconnected with him during the making of the film.

Most recently screened at the Cork Film Festival, Dead When I Got Here has also been shown at DOK Leipzig in Germany, The APHA Global Public Health Film Festival in the US, San Francisco’s DocFest, Medfest 2015 in London and many more film and documentary showcases along with national broadcasts in The Netherlands and Finland to date. The Observer described it as “a masterpiece, epic and intimate”.

Mark Aitken has been making films independently and teaching film practice for over 25 years. He has won several film festival awards and was nominated at the 2006 International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam for his film Until When You Die. Mark’s last film, about fear in South Africa, Forest of Crocodiles, was broadcast in over 100 countries on BBC World.

He joined Goldsmiths in 2006 as an Associate Lecturer on our MA Filmmaking course and since 2010 has run undergraduate courses in Film Fiction. In 2014 he assisted in facilitating the undergraduate Television course.

Writing on Dead When I Got Here, Mark says: “My previous film was about how fear inhibits and paralyses social cohesion in South Africa. I was drawn to Mexico and the area along its northern frontier. Was it possible that people there could transcend their fears when living under such extremes of violence and murder?

“The asylum I found in the desert offered striking and very uninhibited examples of people dealing with their fears, misfortunes and nightmares. It was a very different type of gated community and what had been described as an abstraction in the previous film was now a real experience writ large that I could document. Dead when I got here is not so much a progression from the last film as an encounter with the nightmares alluded to previously."

This film is of interest to students of Film, Visual Anthropology, Latino Studies and Global Mental Health. The work is a fine example of the tenacity required to make documentaries and the value and rewards on offer if you can make it happen.   

 

"A masterpiece, epic and intimate.. The faces in this film are like a thousand Caravaggios - they are us and we are them" - Ed Vulliamy, The Observer

"...as beautiful as anything you will find in Bresson or Tarkovsky, it is one of the finest examples of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen" - Scott Graham, Scottish Mental Health Film Festival

"Gripping and tender" – The Lancet

"The film takes people to a place they did not know and did not expect to visit, the humanity of the insane" - Charles Bowden, writer

Visit www.deadwhenigothere.org or Mark’s website thedeepriver.org for more information.

Find out more about the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths and our MA Filmmaking programmes.