Shock Head Soul

This brilliant study of psychosis, religious freedom and deluded fanaticism is a moving and unique film based on a real story. In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber published a shocking and celebrated autobiography about "madness from within" - Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.

Shock Head Soul is a feature-length documentary which follows Schreber from respectability to madness, interweaving interviews, fictional reconstruction, live-action drama and CGI animation, plus comments from contemporary pyschiatrists, to portray Schreber's amazing life story.

Daniel Paul Schreber was a successful lawyer who, in 1893, started to receive messages from God via a "Writing Down Machine" that spanned the cosmos. He spent the next nine years confined to an asylum; tortured by delusions of cosmic control, suffering the belief that his body was subjected to cruel "miracles". During this nine-year confinement he wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which allowed him to argue that he was sane enough to return to society, and has earned him lasting fame as an outsider artist.

Shock Head Soul is directed by Simon Punnell and was developed in collaboration with psychoanalyst Helen Taylor Robinson.

CERTIFICATE: 12. PAL / DVD REGION 2 (may not be viewable outside Europe)