Courtesy of Jon Alexander
St. Louis filmmaker and activist Jon Alexander is starting a conversation about an often difficult subject: mental health. First, CYCLE, his 10-minute short shot in 2017 about a young black man, Capshaun, from an at-risk environment. Capshaun is "caught in a vicious cycle of anger, violence, and misunderstanding," the filmmaker writes, and the film is about his struggles with mental health stemming from where he comes from. "In it, he's trying to make a change—mentally, for himself—and get out of that environment," Alexander says.
Now Alexander has a new film, Enough, which will screen at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase on July 14. Shot in December of last year, it premiered at the Benton Park Film Festival this past March. More introspective and focused on mental and emotional health, it "tackles the thought of emotional abuse and being hard on yourself, not giving yourself enough credit for the things that you have going on in life," the filmmaker says. "As we all know, life can be pretty tough at times."
Ahead of Enough's screening at the showcase, Alexander shared with SLM his filmmaking process, and talked about mental health awareness and what he hopes viewers take away from his films.
Where do you find inspiration?
Mostly from personal experiences and experiences of people that I'm close to. And a little bit of inspiration from films and TV shows that I frequently watch. So a lot of my storytelling pulls from a very personal place. I feel like that's the best way that I can tell stories and the best way that I can make things authentic. Enough contains a lot more of my personal story. CYCLE, there are bits and pieces of my personal story, but a lot of CYCLE is pulled from people who I know who have gone through similar situations.
What do you hope viewers take away from these short films?
Both films discuss the stigma around mental health. So empathy plays a big part in that because I feel like in order to tackle mental health, you have to understand it. Anytime I go to write a story—whatever it may be—it always starts with empathy and how the audience could connect with this character and understand what they're going through. Hopefully, they apply that empathy to real life.
I want for people to see the two characters in each film and relate to them as if that's a brother, a cousin, a friend, or somebody that they know. I want to normalize these things. I want people to know that these are real, everyday things that people go through, and help build a bridge of understanding around the whole topic.
As a filmmaker, what steps did you take to make sure you are depicting subjects like mental health accurately?
I always start with my personal experiences. I tap into things I've gone through, revisit those places and revisit how I felt in that moment. How hard it felt in that moment, how it affected my work, relationships, personal relationships, things like that, and then I really dive back into that world. So I take my personal experience, which is authentic to me. Then I do some research on certain mental illnesses. So these two films mainly deal with depression and anxiety. Those are two things that I've dealt with myself, and I feel comfortable telling those stories because I've dealt with it firsthand.
I feel like a lot of people that I know, especially a lot of black men that I know, deal with depression and anxiety. So I feel very comfortable telling the story. After digging into personal experiences, doing a bit of research on different cases of mental health and how it affected them and their family, and other people around them. Also, I do the same with people around me, just start with a genuine conversation, like, "How are you feeling?" I give them permission to talk about this and tell them like, I may use this as inspiration for films. I feel like that's very important to be transparent. I don't ever want anyone to feel like I'm trying feed off of their story or make light of it.
How do your films portray black men's experiences?
The black man growing up in America, [it sometimes felt like] you couldn't really explore emotion. You had to be the man of the house. You couldn't cry—any of that. I feel like a lot of black men were conditioned that way, emotionally and mentally, without them knowing themselves. I feel like people are understanding [how this affects men] a lot more now. But growing up in a time where you couldn't really emote the way you needed to, that hurt a lot of people mentally and emotionally. It caused a lot of damage. They didn't necessarily learn how to communicate in the right way, or how to express any emotion other than anger—pretty much just anger. I drew from that. I feel like it's really important for people with children today, especially sons, to let them be emotional and make sure they know it's OK to do that.
