The Film
Jonas is a documentary portrait of my brother and his life with schizophrenia. Ultimately, the film investigates Jonas’s imprecise position. He is intelligent, lucid, and high-functioning. But at 35 still lives with our parents and struggles to form an independent identity. His illness does not define him, but seems to hinder him from that definitive (and “normal”) identity he desperately wants.
The film navigates between past and present, relating the periods of the beginning of the illness, the early warning signs, and the recovery, while also delineating his life now: medicated, banal, and marginalized. We watch him work on the family farm with our father, look for work, and listen to music for hours on end. He laments that his illness was simply “a one year battle” and that he wants to “get out and do something on my own.” But this does not seem to be as easy as he contends.
Jonas is not the stereotypical image of the schizophrenic we have in our heads. He isn’t the homeless person sitting on the sidewalk chanting, screaming, or muttering (that we all nervously try to ignore). He isn’t the violent psychotic often portrayed in our media. He is intelligent and articulate, fully aware of himself and his illness, and frustrated over its ability to limit him. He is complex and human, and a very important counter-image.
Director's Statement
My desire to do a documentary on my brother and his illness certainly comes from a need to do something personal. But more importantly, it has been the film that I’ve needed to make since Jonas was diagnosed with schizophrenia 13 years ago. My own feelings were too complicated and too contradictory for me to sort through. In my mind, I could best articulate my own feelings, impressions, and misunderstandings of his life through cinema. Such an exploration is inherently limiting, but as honest as I could possibly be.
Jonas still lives with our parents, and is perhaps coming to terms with taking the reigns from our father and becoming the full-time farmer that he has always resisted. He still looks for outside work, and devises different strategies for making it “on his own.” And as I sit here writing about my film, wishing that filmmaking were my paid vocation, knowing it is not and may never be, I very much understand his desire and frustration.
