In advance of our two screenings at the FREEP Film Festival, Ellen Piligian, wrote a wonderful article about Lisa and The S Word for The Detroit Free Press:
Lisa Klein knows the silence of suicide all too well.
“The S Word,” her documentary screening Saturday and Sunday at Freep Film Festival, examines suicide through stories of survivors.
Klein is not in the film but hints at her story in the dedication to her father, Harold, and brother, Keith, along with the eight people suicide in the U.S. alone that will be lost during the film’s 1½-hour run time.
The film was a long time coming for Klein, a Southfield native who now lives in Los Angeles. She was a sophomore at the University of Michigan when her father died by suicide. Three months later, her brother ended his life, too.
“When I was going through this I thought I was the only one. Things were definitely shrouded in secrecy,” says Klein, now in her 50s, adding that she didn’t want to make the film about her. “I just feel like there’s so many stories out there.”
The national suicide rate was nearly 45,000 in 2016, according to the American Association of Suicidology (AAS). Suicide tenth leading cause of death in the country and second for ages 15 to 34, according to the CDC.
The film centers on several suicide attempt survivors including photographer Dese’Rae L. Stage, who is fulfilling her own mission to document the faces of survivors for her project, LiveThroughThis.org; a young woman who at one point is discharged from the hospital after an attempted suicide to her mother with no diagnosis or instructions on what to do next; and a family grieving the loss of their adult son’s suicide, wondering: Why didn’t we know? What could we have done?
Read the full article on the Detroit Free Press website.
