Event

Off Label

Oct 04

(Michael Palmieri, Donal Mosher, 2012, Blu-ray, Portland, OR)

Local Sightings Film Festival

Thursday, Oct 04 at 08:00PM
Winner of our 2012 Northwest Film Fund, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's Off Label offers a sensitive and poetic examination of the medicated margins of American society. Instead of taking a clinical look at the issue of pharmeceuticals, Mosher and Palmieri offer the personal stories of eight individuals a young medic who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, a woman whose son experienced a psychotic break and committed a violent suicide in an antidepressant marketing study, a bipolar woman who takes eighteen different prescription drugs a day, a man irremediably damaged by experiments conducted on him in prison, a medical anthropologist and a variety of individuals who make their livings as human guinea pigs in drug test trials. Like their first film October Country, Off Label is reflective work, allowing its subjects to speak as one voice, coming up from the depths of the margins of American society. Multiple variations on the Carter Family song "No Depression In Heaven" guide us along an astonishingly moving and excruciatingly compelling portrait of a nation in thrall.

Off Label closes our Local Sightings Film Festival 2012 - see the festival website for full program details.