Insomnia Documentary
Macedonio Heninger
The Quest for Sleep is a documentary that follows the lives of real people who struggle with insomnia.
Join them on their journey as they find hope through scientific insights that illuminate the
relationship between sleep, our brains and our bodies.
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When Alan Berliner first showed his documentary about insomnia to a group of college students, five or six of them nodded off. But don't take that as a bad review: undergrads get less sleep than anyone in the U.S., and Wide Awake is an engaging peek into the filmmaker's strange, sleep-deprived life.
The scenes of Berliner consulting with (numerous) sleep specialists are funny and informative: you might be surprised by the number of factors that influence sleep quality, including genetics, childhood trauma, circadian rhythms, exposure to light, and diet. But the conversations that Berliner has with his mother, sister, and wife around the breakfast table are the most revealing. "This film took your obsession," his mother observes, "to greater heights." By the end, it seems like Berliner gets what he deserves. "I think I'm addicted to being awake," he says. Still, how many of us might say the same?
Wide Awake is not a fully satisfying look at what some doctors consider a public health crisis. But Berliner deserves credit for recognizing that sleep is a subject worthy of more research, more public discussion, and more art.
Fifteen years ago I was a student at Leeds University. My parents got me a place in Hillel House, a religious hall of residence on the university campus. It was there that I had an experience that was to inspire me to write a film.
Many of the female students at Hillel House observed Shomer Negiah, the practice of avoiding physical contact with the opposite sex. They each had boyfriends with whom they spent many hours late at night in their rooms. This paradox bewildered me.
So late one night, when I was kept awake by certain sounds emanating from a next-door room, my mind started racing. Surely my neighbours would not be indulging in what this sounded like. I had to know what these noises were.
Eleven years later this scene and my own insomnia inspired me to write the script for Sound Asleep. It's the story of Dean Peels, a self-help writer who can't seem to help himself. Over one night, chronic insomniac Dean takes on all the noises that keep him awake, in an epic battle for a good night's sleep. The Hillel House scene was the only direct-from-life scene in the first draft. It was also the only scene my producers insisted I change, saying that it was too unbelievable.
In recent years institutional funding for short films has almost dropped off completely. Reorganisations of the public bodies and reduction in UK arts funding altogether has led to this vital training and development ground for writers, actors and directors almost disappearing.
What funding there is is often very low and tied to restrictions that can make ambitious films impossible. And what funding there is prefers to follow art films and challenging minority interest dramas. There is little support for the film-makers who aim to reach wider audiences, those who can go on to make the big budget films that a future British film industry would rely on.
Rather than a single large backer, film makers reach out to hundreds, or thousands of friends, fans, family and supporters to back their project with small amounts. In return they offer rewards and involvement in the creative journey.
Remember that couple that kept me awake in Hillel House? In the film they are no longer in the garden, but the flat next door, heard but not seen. We are still looking for a couple to join us for a voice session, to record the hysterical amorous sounds that keep Dean awake.
The Quest for Sleep, a feature-length documentary film that follows real individuals whose struggles with sleep threaten to unravel their waking lives, will stream on March 16 at 8 pm ET at thequestforsleep.com. It will simultaneously stream on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and be followed by a panel discussion.
Sleep experts distill the complex process of sleep science into visualizations paired with narration. Featured sleep experts include Michael Grandner, PhD, MTR, behavioral sleep medicine specialist; Meeta Singh, MD, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist; and Dayna Johnson, PhD, MPH, MSW, MS.
A Journal of Insomnia (French: Journal d'une insomnie collective) is a 2013 web documentary about insomnia, produced by Hugues Sweeney and created by Bruno Choiniere, Philippe Lambert, Thibaut Duverneix and Guillaume Braun for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The production had its premiere on April 18, 2013, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival's first Storyscapes section for transmedia.[1][2][3]
Site users must register online for an appointment, after which they receive a phone call informing them that they've been emailed a link to enter site. Once inside A Journal of Insomnia, users can follow the stories of one of four protagonists who share their own experiences with sleeplessness as well as access close to 2000 contributions from other insomniacs that have been collected since the fall of 2012.[1][2][3]
The idea for the site was conceived by Sweeney, who is head of the NFB's French-language Digital Studio, when he became a father for the first time in the summer of 2009. Sweeney was often up at night with his wife due to his infant daughter's irregular sleep patterns and found himself wondering about all the other people who also might be up at this hour, and the impact of sleeplessness on their lives. As one of NFB French Program's main areas of interest is works related to mental health, Sweeney began to imagine what a webdoc on insomnia might be like.[4] The NFB worked with Montreal-based web design firm Akufen to create A Journal of Insomnia.[5]
A Journal of Insomnia was adapted as an installation for the Tribeca Film Festival's first-ever Storyscapes competition. The installation consisted of "a black confessional cube" which rests on an incline in a darkened chamber. Visitors enter through a tilted doorway, then sit before a screen from which a disembodied female voice asks questions such as: "During the day, are you anxious about the coming night?" and "What is preventing you from sleeping?".[1][2][4]
Some people count sheep. Others meditate; some medicate. Alan Berliner has tried all three strategies and many more to fall asleep. In 2004, he began Wide Awake, which uses his personal battle with insomnia as a way into not only the nature and need for sleep (and the ramifications of the lack thereof), but also into the nature of his own creativity and productivity.
Infusing the film with this dynamic psychological component is Berliner's own tortured relationship to sleep, which is inexorably tied to his creative being. He works best at night; it's essential to his creative process. Although he shares an apartment with his wife and baby son, he effectively inhabits a different time zone from them, which serves him well as a filmmaker, but puts him in conflict with his role as father and husband. "Changing my relationship to sleep threatens who I think I am," Berliner discovers.
As the birth of his first child approaches, Berliner realizes he must change his sleep patterns and alter his existence as a perennial night owl, and his search for help is chronicled in the film. Recognizing he will spend years on a project, he wants to satisfy two criteria: fascination and a need--almost a compulsion--to create. "There has to be something about it I need to do, some itch that needs to be scratched, some problem better understood, some journey to go on that I'm willing to take this dive off the cliff," he explains.
Layers of visual and sound material create a depth of detail throughout Wide Awake. Imaginative collages, created from still photos cut from publications and found footage, are intertwined with serious information and research about the nature of sleep and what it takes to fall asleep in today's wired world. Berliner's finely crafted editing and sound design is coupled with humor and precision timing. He's an expert at personal filmmaking, a challenging sub-genre of the documentary form. "I'm in this sort of essay territory, which pushes towards another kind of fringe," explains the director/writer/editor/producer. "Then the film has experimental edges, structurally, stylistically and architecturally, which push it further." His earlier films include Nobody's Business (1996), an exploration of his relationship with his father, and The Sweetest Sound (2001), in which Berliner amiably discovers the other Alan Berliners of the world.
As a subject of his own film, Berliner was as well suited as anyone for a work about insomnia, as he's suffered from sleeplessness since childhood. If he'd taken the conventional approach, he could have placed a newspaper ad in search of subjects or tracked patients at a sleep lab and followed them through coping strategies and possibly recovery.
"As part of the documentary imperative, everything is usually based on access," Berliner notes. "Someone had special access--to a person, place or organization; to some kind of insider information; to a character or series of characters over time." During the production of Wide Awake, his access to the film's subject-himself--was extraordinary. Not only was he a lifelong insomnia sufferer, but he was willing to work and cooperate as long as it took to make the film; he was allowed not only access to his bedroom at night but also to his dreams and his family members; he was about to have a child; and he was a filmmaker. Finally, his subject wasn't afraid to make fun of himself. "I had access to the inside of someone's head and to someone's innermost thoughts," Berliner points out. "That kind of access is very hard to pass up."
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