Laura Cain was a lawyer advocating for emotionally and physically disabled people - especially those further traumatized by the very treatments that were supposed to help. She had a story to tell.
Diana Gross was a visual arts teacher looking to break into documentary filmmaking. She wanted to tell a story.
Two years ago, the former neighbors, who met while both were living in Ednor Gardens, decided to collaborate. They focused their work on four women who had weathered some of the most demanding and demeaning treatments modern mental health facilities have to offer: forced medication, physical restraints, isolation.
The resulting 20-minute testament to human resilience, titled Behind Closed Doors, was named Best Documentary at February's All-American Film Festival in Durham, N.C. This weekend, it will be shown as part of the inaugural Baltimore Women's Film Festival, set for Saturday at Red Emma's 2640 coffeehouse, and Sunday at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
"I needed to find a medium to get the message out," says Cain, 45, an attorney working with the adult mental health unit of the federally funded Maryland Disability Law Center. She advocates for patients often dismissed as needing simply a course of anti-depressants or a stint in a straitjacket. Her job has put her in contact with any number of women like those detailed in the movie - women she and her organization insist are ill-served by a system focusing on a short-term fix instead of the long-term cure. "I want to use the film as a tool for social enlightenment," she says, "to promote social activism."
Behind Closed Doors eschews cinematic trickery in favor of simply letting the four women tell their stories. There's no narration, no context offered by experts, no extensive back story. There's just four women, all in their 30s, all of them recent mothers, all of them with mental-health issues dating to their teens, all of them sent repeatedly to mental facilities for treatment. At the time of the interviews, in the fall of 2005, all were out of treatment centers and struggling to reclaim their lives, demanding the right to forge their own futures.
Valerie Garrett-Miller, at 13, was sent to a psychiatric hospital by her mother. Tonier Cain, first placed in foster care at age 12, was married young - to a man, she says, who paid her mother for the privilege. Sandy Heuisler, introduced to the juvenile justice system at age 16, was raped at age 12 by one of her father's friends. Bettina Johnson entered a state mental-health facility at 16, shortly after her dad was beaten to death with a baseball bat.
Their stories beg to be heard.
"I found myself standing behind the camera, crying," says Gross, 37, who teaches media literacy and digital media production at Garrison Forest School. "I was really unprepared for their stories. What they had to say blew me away."
One woman, remembering how the repeated hospital stays broke her spirit, described feeling like "wilted lettuce." Another recalled how being strapped down brought back memories of being raped. The women talk about being ignored, about having no one to confide in, about convincing themselves that, maybe, if they just quietly took their medicine, they'd be left alone and everything would be OK.
Festival co-founder Deanna Shapiro says a film like Behind Closed Doors is perfect for this year's inaugural event. Organizers have pledged to donate half the proceeds to the Johns Hopkins Avon Breast Foundation Center.
"The film festival is bringing together women's health care and women's cinematic artistry," Shapiro says. "This film exemplifies that - a documentary by women, about women in the mental health care system."
Gross, who grew up in northern New Jersey and came here about six years ago for an educational reform job at the Johns Hopkins University, had dabbled in still photography for years. But a workshop she attended in Maine piqued her interest in filmmaking. Once here, she found plenty of kindred spirits at Highlandtown's Creative Alliance, an arts cooperative that, among numerous aims, helps budding artists network.
"I grew up near New York City," she says, "but I think it would have been much more difficult as a beginning filmmaker there. The arts community is just much more accessible here."
Meanwhile, Cain, using money from a federal Health and Human Services grant, had come up with the idea of making a film that would state the law center's case faster and more effectively than any lecture she could give. "This was a way to get their direct experiences to a wider audience," she says, "without using me or somebody else as a filter."
The two women, although no longer neighbors, reconnected through a mutual friend who knew Cain was putting a film together. In October 2005, the pair interviewed five women who had been in and out of jails and hospitals; four were chosen for the film. All told tales of being abused repeatedly - first, at the hands of acquaintances or family members, then by the health care and criminal justice professionals who were supposed to be helping them recover.
"These women were being revictimized over and over and over again," Cain says.
Other than the interviews themselves, the only footage Cain and Gross included was some generic framing sequences of unrecognizable actors being medicated and restrained, just as the film's subjects had been. That portion was shot inside abandoned medical buildings at the shuttered Crownsville Hospital Center in Anne Arundel County.
"Shooting there really affected us," Gross says. "It looked so desperate inside there. We felt really creepy, going in there and seeing the stuff that had been left behind. There was one isolation room where someone had scratched 'Krypt Keeper' on the wall, and then made tally marks, I guess for each day they were in there."
Cain and Gross share directing credit - a good thing, as they ended up making two versions of Behind Closed Doors. One, targeted at conferences and workshops, includes quotes from doctors and other experts. ("Among professionals," Cain notes with a sigh, "it's not so until another professional says it is.") The other, being shown Saturday at Red Emma's, leaves out the experts.
"By the end of the editing process," Gross says, "Laura was managing the conference version, and I was managing the festival version."
Neither woman is ready to abandon her day job to become a full-time filmmaker - at least not yet. Gross, however, is well along on another documentary, about a men's softball team playing in New York's Central Park that has been together, in various combinations, for more than 50 years. Her father is among the members.
As for Cain, Behind Closed Doors "was the best thing I've ever done in my life, absolutely," she says. "If I could, financially, I would spend the rest of my life making documentaries."
Still, she recognizes her limitations. "I wouldn't know what to do with old guys playing softball," she says with a laugh.
chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com
"Behind Closed Doors" will be screened with several other documentaries between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Red Emma's 2640 coffeehouse, 2640 St. Paul St.
If you go
What:
The first Baltimore Women's Film Festival
When:
11 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Saturday, Red Emma's 2640 coffeehouse, 2640 St. Paul St.; 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday, Baltimore Museum of Art's Meyerhoff Auditorium, 10 Art Museum Drive
Admission:
$10 per film, $70 for an all-festival pass
Information:
bwfilmfestival.com