Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy

Documentary Short Film Program — Sundance Film Festival 2026
United States | 2026 | 15 min | English | Closed Captioned

Director: Joey Izzo
Producers: Adam Ridley; Jordan Londe; Ryan Ridley; Kerry O’ Neill
Editor: Joey Izzo
Performers (lip-sync performances, credited on IMDb): Lindsey Normington, Kate Adams, Katy Fullan, Rebecca Krasny, David Nordstrom

In Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy, history is not uncovered so much as returned. Joey Izzo’s 15-minute documentary short does not approach the Center for Feeling Therapy as a closed chapter or a solved scandal, but as an unresolved wound—one deliberately buried within the archives of American psychology.

At its height in the late 1970s, the Center claimed thousands of members, operated internationally, and promoted itself as a radical alternative to traditional psychotherapy. Founded in 1971 by Richard “Riggs” Corriere and Joseph Hart—both former trainees of Arthur Janov—the Center promised emotional liberation through “feeling.” What it delivered instead was one of the most extreme regimes of psychological, physical, sexual, and reproductive control in modern therapeutic history.

Izzo’s film resists the familiar cult-documentary arc of exposé, downfall, and closure. Crucially, Going Sane situates us inside the Center’s years of operation (1971–1980), before lawsuits and media reckonings reframed the narrative. The audio testimonies we hear come from survivors remembering life during the Center’s control and its immediate collapse, not the retrospective clarity of courtrooms. This temporal choice matters. It restores the uncertainty, confusion, and slow dawning horror of life lived under coercion.

The film’s central formal decision—having actors lip-sync survivors’ original audio recordings—is not a gimmick but an ethical intervention. Survivors remain unseen, preserving bodily autonomy and privacy. Their voices, carried by present-day performers, transform the screen into what might best be described as a living counter-archive. The dissonance between face and voice mirrors the dissociation many survivors describe: the experience of being present while profoundly erased.

This technique also refuses the voyeurism that often accompanies trauma narratives. Performances by Lindsey Normington (Anora) and the ensemble are restrained, deliberate, and almost reverent. No one “plays” suffering. Instead, the film asks the audience to sit with testimony as testimony—to listen without spectacle.

What emerges through those voices is staggering. Survivors recount physical assaults euphemistically called “sluggo,” sexual humiliation and coercion, forced labor that caused lasting injury, financial exploitation, reproductive control, and total social isolation. For nearly a decade, not a single resident member had a child. Pregnancies were terminated through pressure, manipulation, or outright command. Family bonds were replaced with institutional dependency; one supervised visit between a mother and child becomes one of the film’s most devastating moments.

One survivor recalls Corriere’s chilling philosophy: “I want people to fear me. Because it is the most loving thing you could do.” The line lands with unbearable clarity—not because the film editorializes it, but because it trusts the audience to recognize doctrine masquerading as care.

Izzo’s approach aligns with feminist, decolonial, and trauma-informed archival practices that prioritize listening over mastery. The film does not claim authority over this history; it creates a container sturdy enough to hold what psychology, legal systems, and institutional archives failed to keep: generational trauma, stolen years, embodied harm, and the silence that followed the Center’s collapse. Though survivors later won the largest psychotherapy malpractice settlement in California history, no criminal charges were ever filed. Licenses were revoked. Apologies were not given.

In this sense, Going Sane is not simply a documentary—it is an act of accountability. It challenges the myth that abuse is confined to fringe movements or remote communes. Instead, it exposes how easily violence can be normalized in clinics, group homes, and therapy rooms—spaces built on trust, vulnerability, and unequal power.

For a 15-minute film, the density is extraordinary. Going Sane is urgent without being sensational, devastating without being exploitative. It reopens a record that institutions tried to close and insists that survivors’ voices belong not at the margins, but at the center of how this history is understood.

A searing act of cinematic remembering—and a standout in the shorts at Sundance this year.

La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave)

Director: Cristina Costantini
Producers: Alfie Koetter; Cristina Costantini
Editor: Mohamed El Manasterly
Director of Photography: Daniel Hollis Diamond
Music: Jeff Morrow
Featuring: Vanessa Hernandez (Nezza)
Executive Producers: Jihan Robinson; Yuna Ma; Mariana van Zeller; Jeff Plunkett; Alex Simmons; Darren Foster; Juan Arenas; Myrna Pérez

In La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave), fear is not an abstract political condition but a lived atmosphere—one that settles into daily routines during a summer marked by immigration raids in Los Angeles. Directed by Cristina Costantini, the film resists spectacle in favor of attention, locating its emotional core not in enforcement itself but in the quiet calculus of risk that shapes how people move, speak, and remain visible.

That calculus comes sharply into focus through the film’s central figure: singer Vanessa Hernandez (Nezza), whose invitation to perform the national anthem at Dodger Stadium shifts from career milestone to moral crossroads. Asked to sing on a day already charged by heightened immigration enforcement—and coinciding with nationwide No Kings Day protests—Nezza chooses to perform “El Pendón Estrellado,” the official Spanish-language version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The decision is not framed as a protest for its own sake, but as an act of solidarity rooted in identity, heritage, and care for a community living under threat.

Costantini is careful not to mythologize this choice. Nezza is not presented as a natural-born dissident or cultural icon, but as a working artist whose career was just beginning to gain momentum—and therefore could just as easily have been derailed. The film’s power lies in its insistence on ordinariness: courage emerges not from fearlessness, but from hesitation, doubt, and the decision to act anyway. Singing becomes an act of embodied visibility in a moment when invisibility feels safer.

Formally, the film mirrors that ethic of restraint. Much of the footage was captured by Nezza’s partner on a phone throughout the day, from rehearsals to backstage conversations, producing an intimacy that resists the distance of news coverage or retrospective commentary. Mohamed El Manasterly’s editing privileges proximity over polish, while Daniel Hollis Diamond’s cinematography remains grounded and non-spectacular. Jeff Morrow’s restrained score recedes enough to let ambient sound—breath, footsteps, crowd noise—carry emotional weight. Together, these choices align form with politics, insisting that attention itself can function as care.

What La Tierra del Valor ultimately documents is not a singular performance but its ripple effects. Nezza’s voice moves through a city marked by silence—street vendors gone, neighborhoods subdued—momentarily interrupting fear’s hold. The film understands bravery not as triumph or resolution, but as a fragile, communal gesture that briefly restores dignity and presence.

La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave) stands out for its quiet clarity; it recognizes that for communities living under constant threat, survival is rarely loud. It happens in the decision to speak, to sing, to remain present—and to offer one’s voice, even briefly, as a place others can gather.

Living with a Visionary

Short Film Program 1 — Sundance Film Festival 2026
United States | 2026 | 15 min | English | Closed Captioned
Short Film Jury Award: Animation

Director & Screenwriter: Stephen P. Neary
Based on a Story by John Matthias
Producers: Stephen P. Neary; Mireia Vilanova
Animation: Stephen P. Neary; Janelle Feng; Charlie Hankin
Color: Sonja von Marensdorff; Connie Li Chan
Music: Simon Panrucker
Sound Design & Mix: Nick Gotten
Sound Recording: Diana David
Featuring: James Cromwell; Katherine LaVictoire
Production Company: Cartuna

In Living with a Visionary, love is neither idealized nor resolved—it is practiced. Directed and written by Stephen P. Neary, this quietly devastating animated short examines what devotion looks like after fifty years of marriage, when partnership becomes caregiving and shared reality begins to fracture.

The film centers on John, who must learn to live alongside his wife’s vivid hallucinations. Crucially, Living with a Visionary refuses the familiar narrative frame of illness-as-antagonist. The hallucinations are not treated as spectacle, threat, or pathology to be conquered. Instead, they are rendered as part of the couple’s evolving relational terrain—sometimes disorienting, sometimes luminous, always demanding recalibration.

Animation is not merely an aesthetic choice here; it is the film’s ethical engine. Through subtle shifts in color, texture, and spatial logic, the hallucinations are allowed to exist without ridicule or fear-mongering. Reality bends, but it never collapses. The visual language mirrors John’s emotional labor: the ongoing work of loving someone whose interior world no longer aligns neatly with shared consensus reality. The animation is not only ethically restrained but genuinely lovely, using warmth, texture, and gentle movement to render hallucinations as lived-in rather than spectacular.

James Cromwell’s voice performance grounds the film with extraordinary restraint. His John is weary without bitterness, patient without sanctimony. Decades of shared history surface not through exposition but through cadence—through pauses, hesitations, and the quiet acceptance of repetition. Katherine LaVictoire’s performance complements this with a presence that feels simultaneously anchored and elusive, embodying a subjectivity that cannot be fully accessed but must still be honored.

What gives Living with a Visionary its unusual power—and likely earned it the Jury Award—is its refusal of sentimental resolution. Caregiving is not redeemed through epiphany. Love does not restore clarity. Instead, the film frames commitment as endurance: the choice to remain alongside another person even when reciprocity becomes asymmetrical and the future contracts.

Sound design by Nick Gotten and Simon Panrucker’s restrained score further reinforces this ethic of attention. Silence is allowed to linger. Domestic sounds—footsteps, breath, the hum of space—become emotional markers, situating care within the mundane rather than the exceptional.

In a festival landscape often drawn to urgency and rupture, Living with a Visionary offers something rarer: a meditation on intimacy sustained over time, when romance gives way to responsibility and imagination becomes a shared survival strategy. It is a love story not about beginnings or endings, but about staying—and about the quiet bravery required to keep learning how to live together when the world no longer looks the same. By its final moments, I was in tears.

Sundance 2026 Highlights: Going Sane, La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave), and Living with a Visionary are three standout shorts exploring care, courage, and survival. Watch them on Sundance’s online platform Jan 29–Feb 1 with a Short Films Pass for $45: https://festival.sundance.org/tickets/online