“Does it change how you love him?” director Alan Zweig asks from behind the camera in Love, Harold. His interviewee holds strong and remembers the note left behind by a loved one who died by suicide. It’s a painful image tinged with forgiveness.
Love, Harold, which was announced this week as a world premiere for this year’s Calgary International Film Festival, sees Zweig put his gift for gab to good use. It’s a delicate film that invites conversations about a topic people often avoid: suicide. The doc produced by 52 Media and the National Film Board of Canada sees Zweig sit down with people making sense and navigating their grief amid such loss.
It’s a tricky topic, especially when the evolving language for discussing suicide is itself a new ballgame, but the film explores with empathy a taboo topic that touches more lives than people may realize.
“I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but there is grief expressed in the film, and sometimes when somebody expresses grief, I feel like the audience needs a moment. So, I can’t just cut to the next person, like I normally would have,” Zweig told Samantha Hodder in an interview about the film for POV #122. “People ask: What’s the film about? [I want to say] it’s about puppy dogs and rubber balls. I always almost say it apologetically: It’s about suicide. And then they get that look. I want to be conservative, but 50 percent of them, three beats later, say: ‘My uncle killed himself’ [or] ‘my brother.’ Obviously, you can’t say that suicide is common because, statistically, I guess it isn’t. But it’s common enough. Why aren’t people talking about this?”
Featuring interviews with over 20 participants whose lives have been affected by suicide, Love, Harold brings these voices together to break the stigma and invite conversations about mental health before it’s too late.
