Article by Carlotta Profico
Translation by Martina Marino
A Man Imagined is an intimate and painful portrait of Lloyd, a homeless man with schizophrenia, who recounts his life from his childhood, moving between reality and imagination.
The documentary, written and directed by Melanie Shatzk and Brian Cassidy, is a bold work that goes beyond the norms of traditional documentary to explore human storytelling in an evocative and poetic way. Lloyd is a sixty-seven-year-old man living among the decaying urban debris of Montréal, surviving freezing winters and muggy summers. His ongoing psychoses place the story between the concrete and the fantastical, leading the viewer to never truly know if whether they are witnessing Lloyd’s childhood story or something he had only imagined living. The confusion is heightened by the non-linear structure of the narrative, which takes advantage of fragments of images and sounds to immerse the viewer in an enigmatic and sometimes surreal world.
«He approached us, intrigued by our camera and […] he had an almost biblical aura that was unmistakable and a need, however covert, to be seen.». In an interview, Shatzky and Cassidy re-affirmed the idea that Lloyd himself expresses multiple times in the documentary: his need to be seen, to not feel like a ghost. From this feeling arises his desire to talk, no matter to whom: whether it’s to drivers on the road or to passersby, Lloyd tells his story under the pretext of begging for spare change and thanks his listeners for hearing him out. Therefore, the focus is not so much on the protagonist’s story, but on his spirituality, vulnerability and complexity.
The bright, almost shimmering, photography seems to emphasize, on one hand, the environment in which Lloyd, and not only him, is forced to live, while on the other hand, it highlights the feeling of alienation that pervades the film. It’s a highly stylized photography where every shot looks like a painting that plays with lights and shadows, featuring close-ups of flowers and insects that appear radiant, almost excessively saturated. Finally, the ambient sounds – the wind, the creaking floor or the noise of cars – and the minimalist soundtrack amplify the emotional dimension of the story, which is both entirely original and visionary.