Bridging the Gap
2021 · 7m · UK
Directed by Nina Ross, Meg Barrett
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An animated documentary portrait of Meg Barrett, who began hearing a voice at age eighteen, as she negotiates the boundary between her internal world and everyday reality while living with schizophrenia.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the mental illness doc to be a tragedy viewed through a therapist's clipboard—Bridging the Gap torpedoes that by handing the camera to Meg herself, turning the whole inside-out-confessional thing into something genuinely subversive.
The marriage of self-shot documentary footage with Meg's own illustrations creates a formally rigorous counterpoint to the typical observed-subject documentary tradition, establishing a new lineage where authorship and vulnerability become inseparable from method.
The decision to animate Meg's own drawings over her own footage—rather than having an outside illustrator interpret her experience—transforms a modest lockdown project into something structurally singular, where the formal choice *is* the ethical choice.
Festivals
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2021
- REEL Recovery Film Festival 2021
- Factual Animation Film Festival 2021
- Shorts That Are Not Pants Film Festival 2021
- Mental Filmness 2021
- Positively Different Film Festival 2022, Best Film
- Lichtspiel Short Film Festival 2022