That Which Is Possible
Director Michael Gitlin
Countries United States
Duration 83 min
Synopsis
That Which Is Possible is a portrait of an unconventional community of painters, sculptors, musicians and writers working at the Living Museum, an art-space on the grounds of a large state-run psychiatric facility in Queens, New York. Shot over the course of two years and structured across the arc of a day, the film observes with an intimate lens and unspools like a musical, both bracing and tender. That Which Is Possible explores the liberatory and reparative functions that creative action has for a group of artists drawn together by shared struggle. The title, That Which Is Possible, points to several things at once: the Living Museum as a place where a variety of ways of being are possible, where one can paint or sculpt or write or play music, or simply be left alone for a moment outside the temporal and spatial control of the modern psychiatric institution, the way this moment outside of control allows for the possibility of spontaneous interaction, openness, and even joy, the possibility that the Living Museum might serve as a kind of template for a more humane and holistic approach to mental illness, and the utopian possibility that the Living Museum and places like it might serve as transformational fulcrum points for larger social changes.
That Which Is Possible is a portrait of an unconventional community of painters, sculptors, musicians and writers working at the Living Museum, an art-space on the grounds of a large state-run psychiatric facility in Queens, New York. Shot over the course of two years and structured across the arc of a day, the film observes with an intimate lens and unspools like a musical, both bracing and tender. That Which Is Possible explores the liberatory and reparative functions that creative action has for a group of artists drawn together by shared struggle. The title, That Which Is Possible, points to several things at once: the Living Museum as a place where a variety of ways of being are possible, where one can paint or sculpt or write or play music, or simply be left alone for a moment outside the temporal and spatial control of the modern psychiatric institution, the way this moment outside of control allows for the possibility of spontaneous interaction, openness, and even joy, the possibility that the Living Museum might serve as a kind of template for a more humane and holistic approach to mental illness, and the utopian possibility that the Living Museum and places like it might serve as transformational fulcrum points for larger social changes.