I believe in Art for Mental Health. I am the suicide prevention consultant for this documentary. I hope this film will inspire time & money & legislation for suicide prevention.
~ Marcia
Date: March 3, 2014
From: Filmmaker, Bob Hurst, spectigital@gmail.com; and
Consultant, Marcia Epstein, M.Epstein.LMSW@gmail.com
RE: Suicide prevention documentary in production, The Listeners
Film Description:
The Listeners is a new documentary feature exploring suicide as a public health issue in the U.S. In Fall 2013 the filmmakers followed 13 new volunteers through an intensive eleven-week training at the Headquarters Counseling Center in Lawrence, Kansas. Their experience as trainees and volunteers, and the story of Headquarters and other centers like it, will be the center of our story. The film will examine this topic from several angles – a recent history of suicide prevention in the U.S.; assessing how success and failure of prevention is measured; and showing how public attitudes and medical and psychological ideas set our expectations for effective prevention.
The film has three primary goals: 1) to raise awareness of suicide as a public health issue and provide a more thorough context for substantive discussion of the issue in public, private and professional circles; 2) to probe ways in which non-professionals impact the detection and healing of suicidal feelings and emotional isolation; and 3) to explore how scientific and medical approaches to suicide are shaped by social context.
The filmmakers plan to interview key individuals nationally for their perspectives on history, public policy, the role of crisis center counseling, and other issues. We would like to conduct initial interviews during the 2014 AAS conference in Los Angeles.
Website: http://listenersmovie.com/
Filmmakers:
Director Robert Hurst has been working in independent media for more than twenty years in a variety of capacities on feature films, corporate and educational videos, and documentary features. His recent work includes Supervising Sound Editor on the feature film Destination: Planet Negro and Cinematography on the feature documentary Patriot Guard Riders. Other collaborations include Sound Supervision on The Only Good Indian, which Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009; Cinematography on King Corn, a prize-winning documentary about modern agriculture in the U.S.; and Sound Design for Kansas vs. Darwin, which was directed and produced by Jeff Tamblyn. His fiction and experimental films have screened at festivals throughout the U.S. and in Europe. He has also worked extensively on multi-media projects for museum installations, most recently for the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the African Burial Ground Museum and Monument in New York City. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses in fiction and documentary filmmaking. Webpage: http://www2.ku.edu/~film/people/hurst_robert.shtml
Consulting Producer Jeff Tamblyn has made promotional and educational films for large corporations, small businesses, and various nonprofit institutions for over 3 decades. Winner of over a dozen industry awards for communications excellence, he’s also the director, co-writer and co-producer of the award-winning feature documentary, Kansas vs. Darwin, about the 2005 school board hearings on evolution. Besides being part of over 750 educational library collections around the world, Kansas vs. Darwin has been broadcast on 4 regional public television stations, and been used by various political and scientific organizations to educate the public about the intersection between science, religion and public policy. Website: http://www.jefftamblyn.com/
MarciaEpstein 