Franz

Franz is a short film set within a speculative therapeutic session in the near future. Structured as a dialogue between patient and clinician, the work examines contemporary diagnostic frameworks and the systems through which mental illness is defined, categorised, and treated. The clinical conversation forms the narrative spine of the film, unfolding with procedural clarity while gradually revealing the tensions embedded within institutional care.

Rather than illustrating the session directly, the visual world emerges from the patient’s interior landscape. Thought processes, associations, and emotional fluctuations materialise as an evolving spatial environment, destabilising the apparent neutrality of the therapeutic setting. As language attempts to articulate distress, the surrounding imagery drifts between coherence and fragmentation, suggesting the gap between lived experience and medical classification.

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The therapeutic framework presented in Franz raises the question of whether suffering is located within the individual, or within the social, institutional, and economic systems that shape experience. As the dialogue unfolds, the apparent neutrality of diagnosis begins to fracture, revealing how classification can obscure the broader conditions that give rise to it. In this sense, the film proposes that what is treated as personal pathology may in fact be symptomatic of systemic imbalance.