A ‘cathartic’ debut film by Bertin
Kalina Bertin’s debut documentary, Manic, mines her family’s mental health history
AT A GLANCE
Manic opens Friday at the Cinémathèque québécoise. Kalina Bertin will be on hand for a Q&A after the 6 p.m. screenings Friday through Sunday. For more information, visit cinematheque.qc.ca.
In terms of subject matter for a first feature, it doesn’t get much more personal than making a documentary about your family’s inter-generational struggle with mental illness.
And in terms of publicity for your intimate little film, it doesn’t get much bigger — in Quebec at least — than a 14-minute interview on the province’s biggest talk show, Tout le monde en parle.
There Kalina Bertin was, Sunday night, answering probing questions from host Guy A. Lepage about Manic, which traces the life of her late father, a charismatic former cult leader who went by many names, had 15 children from five wives, and whom Bertin rarely saw past the age of five.
“It’s such a weird experience to be so exposed,” she confessed Monday morning. “Making a film, you have so much time to craft your message and decide how to present your family members and characters, and your emotions. It’s so strange to go in front of an audience and talk about those things … when you spent four years trying to figure out how to put them in a movie.”
Bertin spent at least as much time preparing to make her movie. The UQAM graduate went to film school to learn the craft with the express intention of shooting a documentary about her father.
She was following in his footsteps; her dad often filmed her and her three siblings in early childhood on the Caribbean island of Montserrat before their mother took the kids back to Montreal, where she was from. That footage provides crucial perspective in Manic, while juxtaposing an intriguing creative link between father and daughter.
“Growing up, my father was filming all the time,” Bertin said. “The camera was a mystical presence. … When I sat down as an editor, that was precious material. I was trying to revisit my father’s point of view.”
Making a documentary about her father became an excuse to delve into not only the secrets surrounding the past — which her mother almost never spoke about — but to understand the mental health issues afflicting her brother François and sister Felicia in the present.
Bertin keeps the camera rolling during difficult moments in Manic, showing her siblings in states of duress.
“It was challenging,” she said, “but the camera became a necessary ally. What kick-started the process of making the film was, when I finished school in 2013 and I was thinking about making a film on my father, my sister had her first psychotic episode.
“Overnight, she became a completely different person, saying she was channelling God, who was telling her she was on a mission. I became almost convinced that maybe these things were true. I had to pick up the camera to try to understand what was going on.”
François had been struggling with bipolar disorder for more than five years when Bertin began filming. Turning on the camera became a way to reconnect with him after a period in which they had drifted apart.
“I was afraid to be alone with him,” she said. “But when I really made an effort, saying, ‘OK, I’m going to go with my brother and film,’ I started asking him questions I had never asked him before, and we started having meaningful discussions we had never had. The camera nourished that and created opportunities for those connections. It really became a window into my siblings’ world.”
In an unfortunate way, her brother and sister were also connecting with their family history. Bertin’s father, she learned in making the film, had twice been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her grandfather suffered bouts of manic depression and PTSD after serving in the Second World War.
Bertin’s quest for the truth led her to faraway places, including Hawaii and Thailand, where her father met a violent end, explored in the film; and pushed her to contact half-siblings she had never met, as well their mothers, as she unearthed the secrets surrounding his various identities.
“I was terrified, on the phone, trying to connect with these people,” she said. “I thought, ‘Are they going to be mean to me? Am I bringing back demons?’ I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I had to try.”
The results, it turns out, were quite the opposite.
“Often people would cry over the phone. They were so happy to hear my voice. Seeing them in person, they would say I looked so much like my father, it was like seeing a ghost, and that it was like seeing my father through me. It actually allowed them to find closure and make peace, that finally someone was trying to make sense of all this and reconnect everyone together.”
The film had a similarly therapeutic effect at home, providing a way for Bertin and her family to face their difficult past.
“Making the film became really cathartic,” she said. “(It was a way) to make something creative out of childhood trauma, current-day trauma and chaos.”
Seeing themselves at their most vulnerable gave her siblings an essential sense of perspective, according to the director, as they continue to deal with their conditions.
Manic premièred last spring at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival. In the run-up to its theatrical release, Bertin feels like a weight has been lifted.
“It was something I would think of every day: ‘Why did my father do this? Who was he?’” she said. “Now that the film is done, I don’t think about it anymore. I don’t feel disturbed by it. I really feel at peace.”