Highlighting mental wellbeing for the new academic year

We believe that film can be a wonderful tool for helping young people explore their feelings and broach difficult subjects, and we're committed to helping them approach and explore issues around mental wellbeing. Our Mental Wellbeing page boasts a series of resources, film lists and articles to help achieve this, but since it's a new school year, we're highlighting some of our most recent and important mental wellbeing content here.

Mental Wellbeing: Moving Minds at Into Film Festival

One of our six specially curated strands at the 2018 Into Film Festival, our Mental Wellbeing: Moving Minds strand aims to open up discussions around young people and mental health. The mental health spectrum is vast and complicated; unpicking what mental wellbeing means to you can be a challenging task in itself, let alone being aware of the impact that mental health issues can have on the people around you. It's important to be there for others but equally so to learn how to take care of yourself, and the films in this strand highlight characters achieving this with varying degrees of success.

Bookings for the 6th Into Film Festival are open now.

The Importance of Opening Up

Earlier this year we funded Letters to My Younger Self, a film that addresses the subjects of mental wellbeing and suicide head-on. The film is a series of reflexive testimonies from a group of young men and one bereaved mother on the subject of male mental health, and this World Suicide Prevention Day (10 Sept) seems like an apt time to revisit it, especially in light of a recent study's findings that male suicide rates are at their lowest in 30 years.

Find out more about the making of Letters to My Younger Self, as Paul Stapley - Training and Resources Officer in Into Film's Learning team - retraces the creative journey of the Into Film-funded short.

NOTE: While the film broaches important issues that its vital to be open about, please consider before showing the film to your students or club members, as the sensitive subject matter may be triggering or upsetting to some.