Schwenk’s film is a work of images from an abandoned asylum for the mentally insane that is set to haunting music and sound. The film does not directly talk about the institution that was used from 1878 to 1914, nor of the horrors experienced by the marginalized–the mentally ill, disobedient or “promiscuous” women, victims of domestic and/or sexual abuse, the poor, and criminals— who were committed here, often for life. The film instead, is framed in a way that offers the foundations of a story about how people committed to an asylum were treated, which the viewer completes with their own constructed narrative.
This work is part of the larger project called, “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty” that tells stories about prisons and people committed in asylums in a beautifully simple, yet powerful way.