By Frank Stiefel
An extraordinary and innovative documentary, Heaven is a portrait of artist Mindy Alper, whose renowned and astonishing body of work reveals a lifetime of struggle with debilitating mental illness.
Alper has suffered through electro shock therapy, multiple commitments to mental institutions and a 10-year period without speech. Her only consistent means of communicating has been to channel her hyper self-awareness into drawings and sculpture of powerful psychological clarity.
Through an examination of her work, interviews, reenactments, the building of an eight and a half foot papier-mache bust of her beloved psychiatrist, we learn how she has emerged from a life of darkness and isolation to a life that includes love, trust and laughter.
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