The Cobweb

“Nobody Leaves Alive” by André Ristum is shot in beautiful but also distancing black and white. Looking at the Venice line-up, this seems to be a trend this year among the maestros of cinema. The film is inspired by true events that took place in the last century in the “Colonia” hospital in Brazil. Whoever didn’t fit the standards of society, or their family’s perception of it, was locked away, tortured, and killed. There were altogether more than 60,000 victims. Hope dies last, and some of the inmates don’t give up the fight. We’re reminded of film classics such as “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest” or “Alcatraz”.

Two young poets with bipolar disorder begin a highly passionate, volatile relationship that threatens both their futures.

The daily life of five young women living in a Paris hosting center. All haunted by their heavy past (rape, violence, abandonment...), they try to move forward... except one.

"Bedlam!" - a reconstruction of Moa Junström's summer in a closed psychiatric ward. Based on diary notes, the film mixes documentary images from inside the psyche with text messages and reconstructions of events. After being slowly broken down by a boyfriend working in the same dementia department as Moa, the situation becomes so desperate that relatives feel compelled to contact inpatient care.

A psychiatrist experiments on four volunteers with LSD to examine 60's drug culture, soon unleashing an expert in depravity.

Packed off to a foster home after her father is insti­tu­tion­al­ized, a rebellious young Irish girl resolves to bust her dad out of the hospital where he's been confined.

The film tells the story of a young Russian in the early 90s, trying to escape the army in a psychiatric clinic. He's released years later, after intensive compulsory treatment. Has a documentary film maker he gets involved in the Chechen conflict, where he meets his own apparent death. He recalls his life and realizes it mirrors that of his whole generation.

A young girl discovers the truth regarding the secrets of her past. Just as she discovers the truth, events take place that change her life forever.

1963. The young nurse Anna begins working in the juvenile ward of a mental hospital. There she meets Lucia, a fifteen-year-old schizophrenic. Against the backdrop of a struggle between Dr. Marie and the rigid Dr. Oreste to reform patient treatment, a relationship between Anna and Lucia develops, forcing them to make decisive choices for their respective lives.

The story of Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing and his unique community at Kingsley Hall, East London in the 1960s.

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...

This black-and-white Norwegian film is a great rarity: a film with comic elements set in a mental ward which does not overstep the bounds of common sense or good taste.

Alice Gould, a private investigator, pretends to be mentally ill in order to enter a psychiatric hospital and gather evidence for the case she is working on: the death of a patient in unclear circumstances.

Growing up on the grounds of one of Germany's largest psychiatric hospitals is somehow - different. For Joachim, the director's youngest son, the patients are like family. They are also much nicer to him than his two older brothers, who drive him into fits of rage. His mother, painting watercolors, longs for Italian summer nights instead of constant German rain, while his father secretly, but not discreetly enough, goes his own way. But while Joachim slowly grows up, his world, not only through the loss of his first love, gets more and more cracks...

Dora, a young woman at the center of an unusual murder trial, is subjected to a psychiatric evaluation, and as the tests become more personal — and frightening — she begins to question the true motives of her doctor and is forced to live through the recreations of her past.

Marin and Jim are two outsiders, drawn together by a shared history unknown even to them.

In early 1900s Surrey, fifty women labeled as typhoid carriers face unjust confinement at Long Grove Asylum. Isolated and stigmatized, they endure harsh conditions while fighting for their basic human rights against a cruel medical system.

Based on a fictionalized 2015 memoir from psychiatric nurse Mary Dorsan, the text embeds within a teenage psychiatric ward over the course of a year, teasing out the complex bonds, challenges, frustrations and unexpected moments of grace shared between patients and caregivers.

During a 48hr observation at a psych facility, Jack meets Wendy, a young woman with a unique obsession.

These young women are an odd couple. Julie is quick-witted and stubborn. She celebrates idleness and even voluntarily checks into a psychiatric clinic. Nurse Agnes, on the other hand, is always eager to do the right thing and to meet everyone's expectations of her, which is not always easy. When the two of them accidentally meet one day, odds are they won't get along. But they quickly feel attracted to one another, despite their enormous differences.