Fractions of spectral images from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875-1879) – a medical journal intended as a visual reference for psychiatric diagnosis – seep into the film’s opening mimicking a collective involuntary motor behavior, a synchronised blinking. A piano is scrupulously tuned, its strings tensing and loosening, and the spotlight of a theatre illuminates an unusual clinical spectacle of vulnerability and rebellion. ‘At times there seems to be two persons in me, I am at once actor and spectator’ claims the voice of the performer. Through exquisite visual abstraction and a deeply electrifying soundscape Sarah Ballard plunges us into an energetic journey of contagious convulsion that reframes contemporary narratives of mass psychogenic illness.

~Ane Lopez

Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has screened at festivals such as CROSSROADS, Antimatter, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Matter Experimental Film and Media Arts Festival, and Engauge Experimental Film Festival, among others. Sarah is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and is a Lecturer in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Full Out (2025), Heat Spells (2023), to be with you (grotto) (2023), There, Where She is Not (2022)