This week's Hyde Park Pick

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week (13th – 19th May) which, since 2001, has been led by the Mental Health Foundation as a means of helping us to focus on the journey to ‘good’ mental health.

Good mental health feels like a weighty and slightly mysterious beast. Too often it is talked about as a very binary thing - you either have it or you don't. It can also seem unfathomable or unreachable when slightly out of grasp.

Some of the issues we face around mental health today are structural, they are tied into education, and of course the provision of appropriate health care and social services at all stages of life. Big things that we can easily, as individuals, feel hard-pressed to know how to act upon.

But there are things within our control too and one of the biggest is considering how we both participate in and foster better conversations about mental health. There are still significant stigmas around this subject and misunderstandings that can make it hard to have open conversations that are critical to helping support one another or making it easier to ask for what we need.  

This is changing, thankfully, and awareness weeks, workplace policies and best practices, training courses and resources are all helping us to slowly grow our vocabularies and our knowledge around mental health.

Part of that change is reflected in cinema and contemporary filmmaking. There has been a recent clutch of beautiful, complex and emotionally rich films about different experiences with a wide range of mental health problems. In particular, I’ve been drawn to a run of films which explore mental health within families, through the gaze of a loved one.

There’s something so particularly hard about dealing with this in a familial space, with all the politics, expectations, and love. In this situation, love can complicate circumstances for those who are hurting, for those who cannot quite understand, or for those who cannot be understood. There is so much opportunity for support within a family but too often the closeness makes it hard and I think that’s where cinema can be an amazing tool. For me, these films which jump to mind include Leave No Trace, Aftersun, the upcoming Rose – which I think we need to talk about, precisely because of how they invite us to talk, to help put words to hard things. Utilising the accessible nature of cinema: the great performances, music, beautiful scenery and subtle humour - these films invite us into fictional spaces that can make it easier for us to engage with real world stories.

Which, slowly but surely, brings me onto our Hyde Park Pick this week, Luna Carmoon’s directorial debut, Hoard (2024).  We need to add Hoard onto the growing list of films I’ve alluded to above that are remarkable for their intimacy and the beauty of the filmmaking (and Hoard is, from a filmmaking perspective an exciting debut). But, beyond that, there’s generosity here with how Carmoon has dared to tell this story, full of openness and compassion.

Hoard follows Maria - a teenager whose mother used to be a hoarder. Now (set in the ’90s, nearly grown) she lives in a foster home where a previous resident Michael inspires her to revisit her childhood memories and passions that she has repressed.

Hoarding disorder is a mental health problem too easy to misunderstand. The trappings of it are so physical, so overwhelming, they can be difficult to push past (literally and figuratively) to see the reasoning behind it. And if we can’t see any why for these things, at times it can be hard to know where to begin. So, films like Hoard, they invite us to think about these things, to consider them a little bit more slowly and with a different lens that in our day to day lives can be so impossible to do but so important to help us all move forward.

Hoard is showing daily at HPPH from Fri 17 May and you can book tickets here.