Working Like Crazy
1999 · 53m · Canada
Directed by Gwynne Basen, Laura Sky
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Former psychiatric patients who now work in businesses owned and operated by other psychiatric survivors describe both the difficulties they face and the successes they achieve at work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a documentary about psychiatric survivors running their own businesses—which sounds like uplift-porn on the surface, but Basen and Sky refuse the redemption narrative; instead they sit with ambivalence, letting subjects contradict themselves, making something genuinely unsettling out of what could've been pablum.
A formally restrained portrait that trusts the observational mode to carry weight, positioning itself in the lineage of participatory documentary while maintaining rigorous distance—the 53-minute duration and deliberate pacing suggest filmmakers aware of how time itself becomes a formal argument about dignity and witness.
The decision to let workers speak without explanatory voiceover or therapeutic framing is what makes this breathe; Basen and Sky strip away the apparatus and let silence and contradiction do the heavy lifting, turning a modest premise into something that feels earned rather than constructed.