Lindsay the Alchemist

Synopsis: Lindsay is an abscess human laying within dire margins few of us would understand. She is changing. It is this change, and the threat she feels it presents, that catalyzes her decision for self-imprisonment. Equipped with only a camera to record the artefact of her struggle and the bare essentials for survival, a literal video diary is produced documenting her battle with things larger and potentially greater than herself.

Lindsay the Alchemist is a 20 minute exploration of a disease developed through a combination of medical, theoretical and heuristic research. A lot of attention is paid to the character and themes of isolation. The medical research was organized around symptoms of Schizophrenia. The symptoms and the disease itself pattern the film’s narrative; a kind of fictionalized case study is transposed into film. The sole character, Lindsay, is designed without the application of our most common assumptions of gender, mental illness, sexual orientation and ethnicity. The ambition here is to disseminate a compelling character story without perpetuating or condoning the misrepresentation of abject people that is too often reproduced through the marginalization and defamation of an individual’s circumstance.
Lindsay is an undifferentiated Schizophrenic. This is the foundation for every movement throughout the film. Each scene is constructed around how the character reinforces the Schizophrenic’s primary conflict (the core delusion or hallucination the Schizophrenic combats), with dialogue and incident contextualized through the variety of symptoms of Schizophrenia (i.e. disorganized thought, speech and behaviour; Alogia, avolition and social dysfunction).
I wrote, shot, scored edited and directed “Lindsay the Alchemist”. This may seem like a huge undertaking and indeed it was not easy, but one of the many benefits of my formal art school training is that, by necessity, I’ve developed the habit of doing everything on my own. In this way, I have dramatically expanded my skill set. Lindsay the Alchemist is the marriage of all these acquired skills. By the same token, it’s the first time I was able to work with a professional actor in a collaborative and immersive way to really bring the character to life.

“Movies are regarded in the sequence of Mythology, Stories and Drama, as expressions of often obscure fantasies in the people among whom they are produced and diffused.” -Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites. From “Movies: A Psychological Study”.

This is a teaser trailer for the film.