The Desert of the Real

Who am I? What is real? How to live in the madness of the world? These are questions posed by six people who have had psychosis and speak openly about their experience. They have in common that they think deeply, and that at particular moments in their lives, they were under intense personal and social pressure.

The Desert of the Real draws the viewer into their lives before the pivotal events, the psychosis itself, the intensive treatment and the road to recovery, in full awareness that what has occurred cannot be undone. The unguarded and emotional interviews, conducted in their familiar surroundings, are interspersed with staged situations that evoke the interviewees’ experiences of being in a reality that is manipulated, as if in a movie.

The film offers a clear perspective on what it’s like to have psychosis, while also raising questions about how we, as a society, treat one another. One the six offers their view on psychosis as “A normal response to a completely crazy and disturbed society.”