My Suicide

Archie Williams takes a video class at his high school and announces what he will shoot for the term project: his own suicide. The school is thrown into disarray. Family, friends, counsellors and specialists take turns trying to talk him out of it. Archie does not put the camera down, and as he films he begins to see that there are others who feel as he does. David Lee Miller directs. Gabriel Sunday plays Archie, with Brooke Nevin, David Carradine, Joe Mantegna and Mariel Hemingway. The origin is personal. Miller wrote the story with his son Jordan, and Gabriel Sunday, who plays the lead, shares the screenplay credit. The form is scattered and meant to be. The film moves constantly between film clips, animation, recording screens and direct address to camera; the narrative is built like a teenager's video archive. The handling of the subject is careful. It neither romanticises suicide nor turns into a warning film; what it is interested in is how unspoken pain gets shared. It won the Crystal Bear in the Generation 14plus section of the 2009 Berlin film festival. Its problem is density. The visual layers get in front of the narrative at a certain point, and some passages make it hard to hold on to the character. Who it is for: viewers who follow formally experimental films about young people. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy and may be triggering, the editing is tiring, and the film is overdressed in places.