‘I work hard. I work very hard’: a female voice describes herself using language that seems to conform to societal expectations of what a modern person – and a modern woman especially – ought to be. As the narration unfolds without context, her words use stock phrases you might read on a resume or hear aloud as self-affirmations. But the shakiness of her voice accompanied by the wry animated sequences that unfold alongside – a man scaling a house of cards; a porcupine surrounded by balloons – expose the sentiments as hollow and at odds with the narrator’s true experience of life. Based on graphic novels exploring anxiety by the Canadian artist Catherine Lepage, The Great Malaise finds poignance, dark humour and perhaps a good deal of catharsis in mining the gaps between who we think we should be be and who we actually are.
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Consciousness and altered states
You need to make friends with pain to run through the Grand Canyon and back
5 minutes
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Wellbeing
A tender poem doubles as a guide to sitting comfortably in one’s own company
3 minutes
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Values and beliefs
How a God-fearing Jewish woman found atheism – and bacon – in her later years
9 minutes
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War and peace
Before he leaves to go to war, Artem, 18, says goodbye to the man who raised him
12 minutes
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Art
A mindbending trip that summons the forgotten women of surrealism
17 minutes
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Family life
A son of China’s former one-child policy remembers the sibling he never had
8 minutes
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Social psychology
A harrowing account of a 1970 ‘leadership seminar’ spotlights self-help’s dark side
11 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
For Ruskin, words couldn’t capture nature’s palette. So here it is in black and white
6 minutes
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Mood and emotion
Alone on a small island in Belgrade, a father grieves his daughter in quiet solitude
12 minutes