The experience of being moved by a piece of art is universal. Voices With Impact, a program created by 501(c)(3) Art Opening Minds, exposes the intersections of art and mental health by funding and showcasing short films with messages about mental wellness. Art Opening Minds takes these films into colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada for viewing that supports social-emotional learning in classes, group therapy, or individual therapy sessions.
The partnership between Voices With Impact and the APA Foundation began in 2021, and for the first time this year, APA leaders had the opportunity to select a Voices With Impact festival film to receive the APA Foundation Choice Award. “This is not a profit industry, and having the support of America’s premier psychiatric group moves us forward,” said McQueen. “Having that stamp of approval from the APA Foundation gives us credibility on the mental health side so that when we ask folks at Disney or Apple TV to become industry mentors to our filmmakers, they trust that we're responsible in our storytelling.” The APA Foundation team discussed art and mental health with Cary McQueen, founder of Art Opening Minds, and Chris Hyde, director of Voices With Impact, who serve as executive producers on the Voices With Impact short films.
Flower in the Concrete by Kevin Alcantar, a five-minute documentary short that chronicles a Hispanic community’s collective effort to resist displacement from their Los Angeles neighborhood, was selected as the inaugural APA Foundation Choice Award film. Alcantar grew up on Flower Drive, the film’s subject and namesake. Flower in the Concrete opens with an elderly woman’s reflections on the family milestones she witnessed growing up on the same street in the 1960s and 70s. Alcantar’s family has watched the neighborhood thrive for generations. “This is a community that is alive,” he said. “A lot of the challenges that they’re facing are because of narratives that have been crafted about them by people who are from outside of the community and say that it needs redevelopment or renovation. That is just not the case. Flower Drive is a place where life happens, where community happens.”
Because of infrastructure changes being made in preparation for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, the South Central LA neighborhood has become a coveted area for redevelopment. Many tenants were told that they needed to leave their neighborhood. The community gathered to create a tenants’ association and harnessed their collective power to take back Flower Drive. “You feel, as a human being, that you have the power to change things,” said a member of the tenants’ association interviewed in the film.
“Art and mental health share a lot of the exact same qualities: they are super complicated, they touch on a million things at once, and they’re deeply personal,” said McQueen. “Those qualities mean that when you talk about mental health using art, it’s much easier to get your message across. I also think that there’s a level of creativity that all humans have that we start shutting down way too early, when we stop listening to ourselves. And that relates to mental health, too – on the mental health side, we sometimes shut that down early, too. I feel that art and mental health are really interwoven with each other.”
The APA Foundation chooses to support the Voices With Impact grants and film festival because of this interconnectedness. Not only do the films spark discussions of mental health in classrooms and therapy sessions, they can also be cathartic for the filmmakers themselves. “The process of creating something often opens the door to the processing of emotions,” said Hyde. “When I work with these filmmakers on stories they’re passionate about, I always have to say, ‘Are you ready for the feelings that are going to come up around this?’ The creation of artistic work around mental health means that you’re going to be talking about mental health a lot, and so I almost think creative practice is wellness practice, even if you don’t mean for it to be.”
To learn more about the Voices With Impact festival including the theme and proposal guidelines for next year, visit artopeningminds.org/voices-with-impact/festival/.To learn more about partnering with the APA Foundation, visit apaf.org/ways-to-give/partnerships/.