Titel: Mental SPA
(In the realm of the hungry ghost)
Year: 2018
Running time: 18.53
Main country of production: Sweden
Language of dialogues : Swedish with English subtitles
Video Format: HDCAM, Mobile Phone
Color
16.9
Director: Natasja Loutchko
Camera/editing : Natasja Loutchko
Sound: Wank, Harmony Horizon
Cast: Agneta Loutchko Segerström, Natasja Loutchko

How to not be sick in a sick world?
Mental SPA is a short documentary about a mother that is struggling with opiate drug addiction and the daughter's subsequent codependency. Natasja went on a roadtrip to the California desert to undergo a Mental SPA with her mother to face their hungry ghosts of addiction and the complex interplay of it. It's a document about how intergenerational trauma and codependency is manifesting in a daughter-mother relationship, but also how love and the will to overcome it and come closer to each other could be a tool for compassionate self understanding and healing.

With her deliberately naive and notoriously raw aesthetic, Swedish artist Natasja Loutchkos explores themes of trauma and taboo in her work (which spans performance, film, and installation and collaborations). Natasja Loutchkos’s borderline trash aesthetic and socio-documentary film work captures an emotional rawness that reflects both tenderness and anger as she navigates a complex layering of emotions. Mental Spa documents the physical and emotional journey to California that Loutchko embarks on with her mother. The video explores the ways in which motherhood, love, addiction and mental illness are intertwined and pave the way for the unhealthy development of co-dependent relationships in a struggle for order, power and control.