Shock Head Soul

Daniel Paul Schreber was a successful lawyer until 1893 when he started receiving messages directly from God via a Writing Down Machine. He spent the next nine years in an asylum where he was tortured by delusions of cosmic control, suffering from the belief that he was shifting gender and that his body was being subjected to cruel “miracles.” Schreber also believed that only his submission to God’s plan to change him into a woman would save the world. During his confinement he wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which became one of the most influential studies on the sick mind. Director Simon Pummell has again bolstered his reputation as a multimedia artist with this original and hypnotic film: via a combination of animation, documentary footage, acted sequences and interviews with contemporary psychiatrists, he pulls the viewer into the chaotic yet singular world of a man who never gave up his battle for dignity and, in the process, fundamentally influenced the field of psychiatry. He found the ideal actor to play Daniel Paul Schreber in the spellbinding Hugo Koolschijn. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)