Threads of Belonging (Jennifer Montgomery, 2003)

Based on the writings of R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement, THREADS OF BELONGING depicts the daily life of Layton House, a fictional therapeutic community, where doctors live with their schizophrenic patients. In this film we see experimental therapies, power struggles, and the individual arcs of mental illness converge, as a community struggles to understand itself and determine its destiny.

The film was shot in a documentary style with digital video, and combines staged reenactments (in this case, based on case histories) with improvisation. Both cast and crew lived together in the house where filming occurred, so the dynamics of a real community come to bear on the fictional one of Layton House. 

Please contact the Film & Digital Media Department for more information about this event: film@ucsc.edu