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Short Film | Quebec | 2023 | 15 mins | Colour English | 2.35: 1| 5.1

WASHER

In attempting to persuade a former psychotherapist to be the subject of an interview, an obsessive documentarian comes to grips with his own troubled past.

Director Statement

Through de-patterning experiments, patients were reduced to infantile states through sensory deprivation, insulin comas, electroshocks and psychoactive drugs. Ostensibly fort he intention of ridding the patient of past traumas and unhealthy behavioural patterns, most of the patients ended up forgetting their own names, how to read and write, andwere often left with irreparable brain damage. In a recent CBC podcast series entitled “Brainwashed,” Allan Tanny recounts the time his father returned from the Institute, and how agonizingly impossible it was to mourn the loss of someone who was “gone but not dead.”

Washer addresses the painful memories, the severed ties and the emotional legacy that these experiments have wrought upon generations of Canadians. Our film is for those that struggle to understand their suffering, and for those that have had their trust betrayed by systems in which conditioning can take primacy over genuine healing. If patterns are not recognized, they will repeat. We want to demonstrate that storytelling can be a source of healing in and of itself.