On Tuesday 21 October, Mary Wild, Freudian cinephile and creator of the Projections lecture series at the Freud Museum, will join us for a post screening Q&A.

Family Life is a remake of David Mercer’s TV play In Two Minds, which had been filmed by Ken Loach four years previously. The broadcast of the latter provoked controversy, owing to its negative portrayal of the received treatment for schizophrenia. Family Life, like In Two Minds, promotes the theories of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who did not believe that schizophrenia was a brain disease but a psychological syndrome that 'cannot be understood without understanding despair'. In Family Life, a troubled nineteen-year-old’s mental condition is exacerbated by her unfeeling relatives, and the cold and ineffective solutions of medical practitioners, who prescribe drug and electro-convulsive therapy.

- BFI article

Family Life will be screened with English subtitles.

Cast:
Sandy Ratcliff, Bill Dean Grace, Cave Malcolm, Tierney Alan MacNaughton, Michael Riddall