Florid Director on Challenging Misrepresentation of Schizophrenia

The depiction of schizophrenia on screen — especially in horror movies — has largely seen the mental health condition linked to violent and unpredictable rages, showing people when something has gone horribly wrong.

This “misrepresentation,” according to British filmmaker Billy Lumby (a BAFTA nominee for his short film “Samuel-613”), was part of the inspiration behind his feature directorial debut “Florid,” having its world premiere at San Sebastian Film Festival.

The film — also borne out of Lumby’s own mental health experiences — follows Jamal, a young man who hears voices (Lumby says he prefers this term to “schizophrenia”) and is struggling to balance the medication he’s supposed to be taking with his marijuana consumption. Living in supported housing in East London alongside others with mental health issues, Jamal finds himself increasingly lonely and isolated, with the voices in his head, one relating to past family events, only intensifying once he decides to throw his pills away.

While the story doesn’t culminate in the violent depths seen in the cinema tropes Lumby was purposefully looking to avoid, it’s a tough watch. But that’s largely due to the aural sensation provided by the voices, which become more powerful and prominent as the film progresses, dragging Jamal down with them.

Carrying “Florid” as Jamal is Jonathan Jules, best known for Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe,” in his first lead role. “It’s not easy to act in a mentally unwell state in an authentic, accurate way,” notes Lumby.

During filming, Jules wore earpieces on set, with actors in another room speaking into microphones so he could hear the voices live and respond in an unrestricted way. “There were theses little moments where his eyes twitched — it just made if feel so real,” says Lumby. After principal photography wrapped, many months would be spent in post-production augmenting the voices to create the right tone and weave them into the overall soundscape.

Making the editing process even more complex was the fact that Jamal hears three voices. There’s a little girl, representing his self-worth and highly critical of him. Then there’s the voice of real-life rapper Unknown T, who hypes him up. “That’s his more grandiose side, building up his ego and making him think that big things are going on in his life,” says Lumby. But most destructive is the voice of Jamal’s stepdad, which is a negative, paranoid voice that tries to convince him to doubt the intentions of those around him.

“When he’s well, he can ignore these things and it’s just like a little anxious thought in the background,” says Lumby, who was heavily inspired by the Hearing Voices Movement, which rejects traditional psychiatric notions that such voices are merely hallucinations to be dulled through medication. Instead, it argues that they can be a valid part of someone’s identity and history and don’t always exist as a negative experience.

While Lumby says there are definite “autobiographical elements” to “Florid,” he went to great lengths to achieve additional authenticity. As part of years of research into the U.K.’s National Health Service and its mental health system, he went on psychiatric wards across London, shadowed social workers and met those with mental health experiences, plus their families and carers. Lead actor Jules spent time in the NHS, as his co-star Saskia Chana, who plays another resident of the supported housing and potential love interest. But many of the other roles went to non-actors that Lumby met during the extensive development process.

“We have real psychiatrists, social workers, real people with lived experiences, people with diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar and severe mental health experiences,” he says. Jamal’s care coordinator is played by Claire Holman, an real NHS care coordinator and someone Lumby says “opened a lot of doors” in the mental health community for him.

Lumby asserts that Holman and the others from the mental health community wanted to be involved in the project because, like him, they were “passionate” about the subject matter and also “haven’t seen it represented properly or seen their lives shown before.”

The main purpose of “Florid,” which is produced by Rupert Lloyd (an Oscar nominee for “Theeb”) and Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor (“Blue Story,” “Boxing Day”), is “awareness,” says Lumby.

“I wanted to draw attention to an area of our world and our modern contemporary society that many people are not aware of,” he says, adding that mental health is the “least funded” area of the NHS.

“There’s a lot of stigmatization and misrepresentation, and I think the more that we open up and discuss these things, the better. Not everyone may not like my film, but hopefully it causes some kind of discussion and debate around severe mental health. People talk about depression and anxiety, but in the case of severe mental health, I think it’s something that’s still not fully understood.”