Therapy on film: where teenage angst meets interpretive dance and finger paints.
This film tells the story of an adolescent psychotherapy group that met at an outpatient clinic for two hours a week over a period of two years. Art and drama were the major therapeutic tools, along with music, movement, poetry, and filmmaking. The varied expressive modalities are demonstrated in this film, as well as the different roles the therapists played in facilitating the group process. In addition to telling the story of the group, this film also includes detailed case studies of two of the members. It is a rare example of multimodality group therapy unfolding over time.
Direction
Pioneering 1970s documentary approach to invisible processes.
Production
Rare archival window into early expressive arts therapy.
Writing
Case studies that read like poetic excavations of teenage souls.
Director
Judith A. Rubin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This 1975 film captures the human potential movement's belief that creativity could heal where traditional talk therapy failed—essentially the ancestor of today's 'art therapy' Instagram aesthetic, but with infinitely more sincerity and less beige.
Directors Judith Rubin and Eleanor Irwin were actual practicing therapists who pioneered filming the therapeutic process itself, facing ethical minefields about consent and voyeurism that remain unresolved in documentary filmmaking today.
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