Throughout the span of 17 years, from 1981 to 1997, independent filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson gave birth to a 36-hour chronicle of her life, a first-person epic centred around several major and minor events, in the attempt to observe and internalize her continuously changing self-image. Five Year Diary is the result of a life-long self-therapy expressed through the layering of spoken dialogue over imagery that reveals the deep, unstable emotions that veiled the filmmaker’s world. Here, we present two of the 81 reels that make up her magnum opus.

Reel 23: “A Breakdown (and) After The Mental Hospital, September 1 – December 13, 1982”

Reel 40: “Visiting Grandmother, My Insanity and Wyoming, July 17 – August 26, 1984”