The film and discussion series starts off with John Sayles' Limbo, and continues each following Friday with Lars and the Real Girl, Joshua, and finally Saraband.

Tickets for individual sessions are $15, or you can attend the entire series for $55. Advance purchase, student and senior discounts are available, and CEUS/CMEs are provided for mental health care professionals. Further information can be gotten by calling 410-792-8060 or 301-470-3635 or by visiting the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis website. The brochure is also available to download here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF form.

The Center chooses films for this series because they are psychologically perceptive and stir the emotions and curiosity of the viewers. Looking through the lens of psychoanalysis enriches appreciation of the film by examining emotions and thoughts evoked by the film's story and imagery.

Films to be discussed this year are:

Limbo
(1999) Rated R, USA, Director: John Sayles
Discussant: Robert Lessey, M.D.
Friday, April 10, 7:30pm
Website: New York Times Overview with trailer
From this beautifully filmed Alaskan adventure comes the line, "This must be Limbo -- it's too cold for hell." Director John Sayles plunges us into an uncertain borderland between civilization and wilderness, between adulthood and childhood, between good and evil, between oblivion and salvation. Choosing a breathtakingly spectacular and dangerous external natural world as both backdrop and metaphor for his characters' internal fight for survival, he portrays a treacherous crevasse separating hope and trust from suspicion and despair, revealing secrets of their frozen or submerged past. Earlier relationships and experiences have left them wounded and scarred, but they must find a way to trust again, or die.

Joshua
(2007) Rated R, USA, Director: George Ratliff
Discussant: Leon Levin, M.D.
Friday, April 24, 7:30pm
Website: www.foxsearchlight.com/joshua
A mother's second postpartum depression unravels a seemingly successful Manhattan family. Joshua, age 9, is a precocious child whose perpetually dark countenance and stiff posture portend something ominous. Aptly named after the biblical figure who brings the walls down, he is both victim and perpetrator of the family meltdown. This is a horror film that does not use blood and gore to create the mood, but instead reveals to us the psychological demons that are unleashed by mental disorder.

Lars and the Real Girl
(2007) Rated R, USA, Director: Craig Gilespie
Discussant: Noreen Honeycutt, Ph.D.
Friday, May 1, 7:30pm
Website: www.larsandtherealgirl-themovie.com
Having lost his mother at birth and raised by a mourning and distant father, Lars develops a style of living his life as an observer at a distance. Stimulated and frightened by the pregnancy of his sister-in-law, Lars reacts with his own "delivery" of a life-size doll. He is helped by a doctor to use the doll to work through deep and painful conflicts. Mother figures in the form of a blanket, his family, and the caring doctor, along with the unconditional support of a community, allow Lars to move toward love and "realness."

Saraband
(2003) Rated R, Sweden (English subtitles), Director: Ingmar Bergman
Discussant: Bruce Sklarew, M.D.
Friday, May 15, 7:30pm
Website: www.sonyclassics.com/saraband
Saraband is 30-year sequel to the 1972 film Scenes from a Marriage, with Liv Ullmann as Marianne. In his nineties, Ingmar Bergman creates his last film, and it is clearly autobiographical. The theme of loss and unresolved mourning is central, revolving around the continued emotional presence of a dead wife and mother. The characters (and Bergman) struggle with sado-masochism, competitiveness, fatherhood, and impending death. Bergman presents an unusual and stately structure of ten duets between the four characters in the film.