I SEND YOU THIS PLACE
2012

Full-length Documentary
Watch the Trailer above

DIRECTED & CREATED BY ANDREA SISSON & PETE OHS
Written by Andrea Sisson;
Music Composed, Performed, Recorded and Arranged by Pete Ohs & Andrea Sisson.

*World Premiere 2012 FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL.
*Made possible by the U.S. Fulbright Foundation
*New York Times Review

Both the artist creating her self-portrait; and the documentarian creating the portrait of his subject,

I SEND YOU THIS PLACE is the debut feature-length documentary from collaborators artist Andrea Sisson and filmmaker Pete Ohs. The film was produced with the support of the U.S. Fulbright Foundation, filmed during a 1 year Icelandic hermitage, and premiered at the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

The piece explores the perception of mental illness. It is a family member's account (the artist) of the trauma, sensations, and decoding stages associated with the issues and situations.

The documentary blends fiction and non-fiction to tell the story of a young woman whose encounter with the intense natural beauty of Iceland inspires her to examine her comfortable notions of sanity and insanity and to explore mental illness and family bonds through Iceland's otherworldly terrain. It questions this by simply asking "Can something as natural as the weather be deemed mentally ill?" The island's intensity reminds Andrea of her schizophrenic brother Jacob, a young man who isn’t bound by the conventional standards. “Delusional” thought and “erratic” behavior seem not so different from Andrea’s untamed surroundings in which the wind rants, the clouds are grandiose and the seasons bi-polar.

Part memoir, travelogue, and personal essay, the film tells the story of a wanderlust that sparks an unexpected spiritual transformation - in a place where glaciers are more common than billboards, where inhabitants are known to speak to mountains, where summers bring twenty- four hours of daylight, and winters bring twenty-four hours of darkness. Andrea’s breakthroughs lead her to embrace her own eccentricities, namely, her ADD diagnosis which she comes to view as a gift, not a curse. Led by Pete’s probing questions, Andrea arrives at fresh and startling insights and through the personal tool of documentation presents the island itself as a new model for the study mental health.

"Moves with lovely intuitive rhythms." - NY Times
“Gorgeously shot and made with genuine invention." - Filmmaker Magazine
"Do you know Radiolab? That...was like an episode of Radiolab." - Audience member

---