Mad Dance is a trilogy of provocative and beautiful short films that re-envision the way we think, speak and feel about mental distress and wellness in today’s chaotic world. These transformative films offer new maps for navigating madness with insight, healing and hope.

Three films by American filmmaker and actress Sheila McLaughlin stand for a trend in experimental film that took place in the 70s and 80s, moving it away from a radically material-based, self reflexive aesthetic towards the narrative forms of independent film, within which new forms of cinematic representation and documentation could be developed.

From his early short films shot in Madrid in the 1960s, his first features made in Paris in the 1970s, his critically acclaimed Flammes (re-released in Paris this Spring by Capricci), his later, more ambitious yet rarely seen features of the 1980s Grenouilles and Merlin, to his recent personal essays shot in digital, the work of Adolpho Arrietta spans a multitude of styles and themes, yet offers a singular grace, a poetic sensibility and a refreshingly keen eye for composition, rhythm and character study.

Beckman began making films in the mid-1970s using Super-8 sound film. Neither documentaries nor narratives, these works, as Jim Hoberman puts it, are "like primitive cartoons ... enigmatic allegories filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery ... perceptual game­ playing and ingenious optical effects."

This first anthology brings together three pieces from 1978-1980: We Imitate; We Break Up (1978); The Broken Rule (1979); and Out of Hand (1980), made after her CalArts studies and featuring many other artists as actors.