16, from Rooty Hill High School (Australia, 2023), is a short film that explores themes around adolescence, mental health and the journey toward goals. It draws on school life, music and questions about motivation, medication and employment without offering tidy answers. The film speaks quietly to experiences of anxiety, achievement and the pressures faced by teenagers, inviting viewers to reflect rather than judge. As part of the Focus on Ability International Short Film Festival, 16 adds a youthful and thoughtful perspective to our programme, highlighting how stories about ability and individual resilience can come from many places. A subtle, resonant piece.
Hello. Having a mental illness imposes many difficulties in my life. It's hard sometimes not being able to do what everyone else does. It's hard when my anxiety cripples up and I don't know what to do. But my mental illness allows me to create unique experiences for myself and the people around me. For example, my dream is to be a sound engineer musician. It's a hard job to have when you have anxiety. This job requires you to hope that you have the next gig. But I'm thankful for my therapist and medication to help me get through it and help me to understand that life can be a little crazy sometimes, but it doesn't mean you have to quit your dreams and work a normal 9-to-5. Nothing wrong with working 9-to-5, but for me personally, my dream is to become a musician. I don't think my mental illness has ever capped me on being a musician. If anything, I've used my mental illness to inspire me to compose songs that no one else I know could think of, because it's uniquely me and it's uniquely mine. When I think about my mental illness, I rephrase it from being mentally ill to being uniquely human. I've been broken, torn down, stripped for parts, and after all that, built back up. It sounds painful and wrong because it is, but there's a beauty in it. For each time I'm built up, I'm becoming more and more like me. I wrote this poem in my first book that I ever published, my only book I've ever published. That whole poem is about every time that I felt that someone hurt me, or I felt bad for myself, or I felt like I was dying, and it reminded me that each time that I come up again and I improve myself or I learn a new tactic to get over anxiety or I learn something about me, I'm becoming more and more like me and I'm learning more about myself. Because sometimes it isn't, you know yourself instantly. For me, it was having a journey to learn who I am and what it means to live with this illness and what it means to live with it and being able to do things instead of being disabled. Oh hey, welcome back to the video. This is our track for the video. You probably remember it playing throughout the entire video. All this is made by me, the entire song, the guitar, keys, the drums was a plugin, so not completely me, and the bass was written by me also. So being a sound engineer, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of experimentation and a lot of work and a lot of music theory, but I do love my job. I also get to do this outside of school. A lot of the time, I love it. You'll see the guitar. It's a really simple track, four chords. For me, it's a very vibe-y, lo-fi type of thing. I mean you can see on the top here, it's lo-fi track number three, EP coming out soon. Yeah, pretty much. I think it's a dope track. I hope you guys like it. I hope you guys like the video.
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by Rooty Hill High School - SCHOOL DOCUMENTARIES
