mental health

This video illuminates the life and circumstance of LGBTQ youth of color, ages 16-22, through the exploration of their personal stories. It also dispels myths and provides much needed community resources. COLOURS's mission is to garner the strengths and talents of sexual minority people of color: male, female, transgender, African American, Latino, Asian American to construct an affirming and caring community.

In October 1979, Margie Strosser was raped in the elevator of her apartment building. Two weeks later, she asked a friend to interview her about the incident. Ten years later, she remembers and recounts the rape, revealing the emotional texture of the experience and the reshaping of the event through memory.

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"I just love that place. It's a haven," a woman says with a joyous smile as the video opens. Featuring exuberant testamonials from HIV positive members of the We The People "family," this doumentary short lovingly documents a unique HIV and AIDS-themed social service agency located within shouting distance of City Hall. We The People, an organization run by and for people with HIV, has produced a moving video which documents the organization's efforts to emotionally, socially and economically empower people with the HIV-virus.

A lucid, healing document emerges from the videomaker's deconstruction of her memories of abuse. The experimental narrative meditates and functions upon the premise that traumatic memories are encoded as an illogical melange of pictures, feelings and fears.

" I think stereotypes exist, for the most part, because human beings will only do as much as we have to do. We're lazy. I think it's a very human thing to sort and group and categorize people," says a R.A.V.E. member calmly. But (In Stereo) types uses humor, rap, laugh out loud Hollywood clips and poignant testimony of their own experiences as stereotypees and stereotypers to make a good point. Unchecked stereotyping dehumanizes us all, whether it's in your face -- "People who know I'm gay ask me if do hair. I say, no, not all of us do hair.

In "Conversations with Flower," pet therapy volunteer Jacque visits an independent living community with Flower, a loveable mutt from a local animal shelter. Richard and Hazel, together for over 50 years, Marion, lonely and sweet, and James, still hurting from his wife's recent and unexpected death, all light up when Flower arrives. But the cooing over their four-legged visitor and stories of past pets eventually subsides. What began as a simple interaction between people and dog turns into much more as the residents begin to reminisce about the best and worst times of their lives.

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This personal and experimental documentary is a powerful, impressionistic challenge to the professional psychiatric community's definition and treatment of depression and emotional problems.