What makes a documentary truly captivating? For a film discussing personal experiences, relationships, traumas, and mental well-being, balancing the nuances of emotions, narrative styles, and approaching perspectives is a delicate craft. The audience craves empathy, not a lecture, and creating an informative and endearing documentary about mental health issues is a significant challenge. It's a delicate balance, and either condescending, distant, overgeneralizing, or too unrelatable messages can quickly bore viewers away. Furthermore, despite the newsreel footage vesting them a coat of “reality,” more insightful viewers can still identify the subjectivity in depicting the topic. Therefore, no exhausting preaching would be easily pardoned. And that is why Thank You for Sharing stands out.

Of course, it demonstrates a professional, scientific spirit approaching its initial subject matter, mental health issues. Diving in from the pressing, modern news clips, it traces back to the origin of this issue and explores the objective historical background. Besides modern TV newsreel clips, it provides advertisements and films from earlier periods, interviews, and cartoons, all immaculately organized. More importantly, regarding time limitation, this film does not hold any charges on the predecessors but focuses on the consequential cause of biases. Its message is straightforward and reassuring: We’re resources for people to refer to, not speakers at rallies shouting “pick our side.” While it is common for documentaries to stretch for episodes, Thank You For Sharing condenses discussions on the historical development of mental health as a notion, therapy, and the phenomenon of overdressing mental health, covering gradually evolving interpretations and cross-generational discourse into one hour and forty minutes and invites viewers into a concentrated brainstorming.

Another reason I like this film is that it is like a cup of tea, the fragrance of which only becomes more inviting and unique as you continue. As the film resumes, the discussion starts shifting from only addressing mental health issues to including the subsequent problems that arise when colliding with the contemporary social environment, and that is when more interviews take over the center stage. Entailed by the nature of modern documentaries and mental health discussions, Thank You For Sharing leaves abundant space for personal stories and monologues, calmly narrating their encounters and thus introducing another highlight of this film. As its title says, this film is similar to group therapy, featuring a sincere, open conversation on a level ground. Yet, as first-person narratives and individual stories are not uncommon in documentaries, the general practice is proposing a (usually subjective) thesis and then displaying a series of personal stories from different aspects but oriented on the same subject matter. The problem is, since the emotional bias on the matter is already established, these stories are primarily supporting evidence, uniformly aligned, and used as a persuasive strategy rather than penetration points for viewers to generate their unbiased understanding. Thank You For Sharing, however, should be praised for its departure from these typical practices, for being unafraid to demonstrate proposals not following the current political correctness, and for its willingness to create a conference platform. It bravely casts aside the justification for marketing strategies, ripping off the mask of excuses and disguises for whitewash. It is only thus that we, as the audience, can gain the autonomy to think without disruption.

This film surprises me again in the end, as it correlates the recapping of historical background and reconstruction of modern derivatives and concludes the film with an unexpected but hopeful note. Its message sheds light on an often overlooked and underappreciated solution that returns to the original simplicity of human nature and points to the forgotten bright moon to those who lost their way in the mist.

Thank You for Sharing screens at the Fall 2024 New Jersey Film Festival on Sunday, September 22. The film will be Online for 24 Hours on this day. Tickets are available for purchase here.  

The 43rd Bi-Annual New Jersey Film Festival will be taking place on select Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays  through October 18, 2024. The Festival will be a hybrid one as it will be presented online as well as doing in-person screenings at Rutgers University. All the films will be available virtually via Video on Demand for 24 hours on their show date. VoD start times are at 12 Midnight Eastern USA. Each General Admission Ticket or Festival Pass purchased is good for both the virtual and the in-person screenings. Plus, acclaimed electronic music artist Jim Haynes will be doing an audio-visual concert on Friday, October 18 at 7PM! The in-person screenings and the Jim Haynes Concert will be held in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ beginning at 5PM or 7PM on their show date. General Admission Ticket=$15 Per Program; Festival All Access Pass=$120; In-Person Only Student Ticket=$10 Per Program. General Admission Jim Haynes Concert Ticket=$25. To buy tickets go here:  https://watch.eventive.org/newjerseyfilmfestivalfall2024