Much of the footage for Jonathan's Return was shot during the last 15 years with different cameras and points of view by Jon himself, Eran (father/director), and his case manager. Jon's family members will reflect on the past and present to complete this gestalt of voices.
A final "voice" will be added through the inclusion of five workshop sessions of other family members who are dealing with similar problems, including Jon's parents. Like Jon's relatives, the workshop participants are searching for ways to communicate with their sick family members.
As part of the film, Jon's family will be tested at the University of Pennsylvania Schizophrenia Institute to suggest the "genetic components" of mental illness. Jonathan Returns is intended for audiences who are more and less familiar with the complexities of mental illness. The film is designed for public television and public screening nationwide.We live in a society where about one hundred million Americans are affected by mental illness: a society caught in the tension between the individual's struggle to succeed and the family's ideological place as the communal core. Jonathan Returns takes a close up look into the microcosm of our society in a moment of trauma and need, proving again that all we can sometimes do is "be there".
Five years ago my son had a mental collapse and was later diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia. He was serving in the Israeli Army , so I had to go there and bring him home. He has been in 7 hospitals, for a week or two in most places. The doctors in each hospital, under the pressure of the insurance companies, tried to help him. We came to visit him every day and soon realized that we were the only visitors. Where were the other families, friends, and community representatives? The closer the hospital was to the city, the clearer it became that many of the consumers had no home or family. They came from the streets and went back there. Five years of dealing with hospitals and insurance companies have made me a kind of a specialist eager to share my experience. I decided to make a trilogy of films which will try to investigate what happened to the community that was charged to replace the state mental institutions.
We came up with the idea to make three films trying to find out what has happened to the mentally ill since the state institutions closed their doors. They were left to the streets, families, and out-patient facilities.
Patricia Baltimore, the first part of the trilogy, is now in distribution. The film tells the story of a 50 year old brave and outspoken African American woman, Patricia Baltimore, who gets a home after seven years of homelessness, and decides to take a shortcut through the system and help other homeless people get their own homes by themselves.