Rocks in My Pockets

Signe Baumane, a Latvian-born animator living in New York, tells the story of her own family. Five women: her grandmother, her cousins and herself. All of them talented, all of them intelligent, and all of them living with depression. Baumane does not hide her own illness either; she describes the four months she spent in a Soviet psychiatric institution as a young woman. The film is hand-drawn animation narrated in the director's own voice. The subject is heavy but the telling is not harsh; Baumane calls it a funny film about depression and never lets go of the humour. The title refers to the death of Virginia Woolf. Nowhere does the film present death as a solution; it is built instead on naming the thing nobody talks about.