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Movie Review: “Hollywood Beauty Salon” Is A Brave And Inspiring Look At What Mental Illness Recovery Is When Love And Support Are In Place

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“Hollywood Beauty Salon” portrays life at an intimate beauty parlor inside of the Germantown Recovery Community, a non-profit mental health facility in Northwest Philadelphia, where staff and clients alike are in the process of recovery.

Although difficult and uncomfortable to watch at times due to the unapologetic unfiltered look at mental illness recovery, “Hollywood Beauty Salon” is honest and inspiring. This film exposes issues too often ignored: mental illness in minority communities and how recovery is being given a fighting chance with the love and support of the program that is “Hollywood Beauty Salon.”

HBS portrays life at an intimate beauty parlor inside of the Germantown Recovery Community, a non-profit mental health facility in Northwest Philadelphia, where staff and clients alike are in the process of recovery. By gathering together to get their hair done, share stories and support one another, they find a way to rebuild their lives. The documentary was created in a work-shop style over the course of four years, and served as part of the recovery and healing process. Each of the subjects in the film payed an active part in shaping their own narratives and determining the unique style that it was filmed in. We are given a chance to realize that even in the midst of severe mental illness, people all want the same thing – to have a life. To live through sorrow and happiness with love and dignity surrounded by people who love them.

Award-winning documentary film director Glenn Holsten’s creative mantra is: authentic experiences, recounted by real people, artfully portrayed. And this ideal is brilliantly realized in HBS. During the workshops that formed the documentary, the participants are asked what their first memories are, what they feel led them to where they are now and how do they want to tell their story. They explore the use of animation, illustration, computer special effects, flashbacks, poetry and music. For me, the most moving story was when a child plays the part of the patient and monologues a memory of being a neglected foster child. At the end of the monologue, the patient sits down next to the little girl and tells her that it’s going to be OK. That being neglected and feeling forgotten isn’t going to last forever because “We make it. We find love and happiness and we make it.”

Many of the people in the documentary are the same people that most of us would avoid or ignore if we saw them on the street. We would fear them because we don’t understand how hard it is to work through and recover from mental illness. Through HBS we see the lives that people had before mental illness over took them. The stigma of mental illness is not as bad as it once was, but is still very tragically misunderstood and stigmatized. Far too often people trying to recover from depression, bi-polar or schizophrenia are told: Get over it, just shake it off. Go take a walk in the sunshine. Just get out and do something. You don’t look sick. You’re such a drag to have around. I’m so tired of you not even trying. Why don’t you just put on your big girl panties and get on with life? None of these statements would ever be made to someone dealing with cancer recovery chemo and radiation, but because of the stigma and invisibility of mental illness, compassion love and understanding also become invisible. At the HBS, huge steps have been taken to create a place where people can recover mentally, physically and spiritually.

The Germantown Recovery Community is a community-integrated recovery center that serves persons with behavioral health and addiction challenges. The film presents to a national audience NHS Human Services’ successful execution of a model of mental health care—unique to the city of Philadelphia—that combines both treatment and rehabilitation services that are individualized, choice-based, consumer-driven, family-inclusive and community-based. Director Glenn Holsten conducted a 16-week workshop series at the Hollywood Beauty Salon in 2011, which created the foundation for the documentary script. Holsten and a film crew collaborated with 8–12 women and men who patronize and/or volunteer at the salon to develop individual stories centered around the special Hollywood Beauty experience. Participants discussed the depths of their illnesses and their paths to recovery. They tapped into joyful and painful memories alike—and explored their hopes and dreams for the future.

The final script that emerged from this workshop process is a new kind of documentary—a hybrid that artfully combines real life “vérité” (fly on the wall) sequences of everyday life in the beauty parlor with highly crafted filmic sequences employing animation, fantasy, and dramatic reenactment. The film’s subjects decided how their personal histories should be documented and shared; each designed the storytelling approach of his/her section of the film.

I walked away from “Hollywood Beauty Salon” with a renewed belief that the broken values and perspectives in society can be healed and changed. That the courage mental health patients possess is enormous and worthy of admiration and deep respect.

Opens in select theaters Friday, July 29th

 
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