“Throughout my whole life, I’d find myself in places and not know how I got there,” says Hilary Stanton, a mother, a senior and a brave and beautiful queer woman.
When the Devil Knocks documents Stanton’s journey through extensive therapy to manage her dissociative identity disorder (aka DID, formerly known as multiple personality disorder). Attending school meetings, driving her car, feeding her children — many different day-to-day tasks during much of her adulthood — were accomplished by some of her 35-plus other personalities (aka alters), most notably, during the counseling itself.
“For years, my alters went to therapy and I wasn’t there for more than five minutes,” Stanton reveals.
In all, more than 40 hours of videotapes of her psychotherapy sessions were filmed over a seven-year period. Vignettes of these sessions, including her therapist counselling various alters in a single session, offer a deeply intimate and profound opportunity to witness Stanton and her therapist’s inner workings, originally filmed with hopes of training and educating other therapists about DID.
The documentary is a difficult journey to witness and includes discussions of sexual abuse and evidence of self-harming.
But When the Devil Knocks is ultimately a success story, culminating in hopefulness and joy.
The Deets
World premiere
When the Devil Knocks
Wed, Oct 13, 6pm
Empire Granville 7, 855 Granville St
Thurs, Oct 14, 11am
Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St
viff.org
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