Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405

Directed by: Frank Stiefel

2017 | USA | 40 minutes

2018 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary Short, Heaven is an extraordinary and innovative documentary, a portrait of artist Mindy Alper, whose renowned and astonishing body of work reveals a lifetime of struggle with debilitating mental illness. Alper has suffered through electro shock therapy, multiple commitments to mental institutions and a 10-year period without speech. Her only consistent means of communicating has been to channel her hyper self-awareness into drawings and sculpture of powerful psychological clarity. Through an examination of her work, interviews, reenactments, the building of an eight and a half foot papier-mache bust of her beloved psychiatrist, we learn how she has emerged from a life of darkness and isolation to a life that includes love, trust and laughter.