FULL OUT
2025 | 14' |16mm > digital | 5.1 and stereo

In 19th century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse. Full Out is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body's capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can both fracture and heal.

Trailer




"Fractions of spectral images from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875-1879) – a medical journal intended as a visual reference for psychiatric diagnosis – seep into the film’s opening mimicking a collective involuntary motor behavior, a synchronised blinking. A piano is scrupulously tuned, its strings tensing and loosening, and the spotlight of a theatre illuminates an unusual clinical spectacle of vulnerability and rebellion. ‘At times there seems to be two persons in me, I am at once actor and spectator’ claims the voice of the performer. Through exquisite visual abstraction and a deeply electrifying soundscape Sarah Ballard plunges us into an energetic journey of contagious convulsion that reframes contemporary narratives of mass psychogenic illness." –Ane Lopez, BFMAF 2025



"Sarah Ballard’s Full Out delves into the transformative possibilities of the body as a site of violence, inexplicable impulses, and radical change."–The Camelia Committee (Mira Adoumier and Nour Ouayda), Images Festival, 2025



“after the film tells us about the extraordinary potential of hysterical bodies but before the tuning of the piano (that practice of asking frequencies to align themselves in relation to each other) the voice over narration switches from third person to first person. indicting, with that small pivot of address, we viewers in the entanglement.

so that we are also performing madness, performing inclusion and belonging?

the precise, suspenseful and sometimes funny soundtrack (the movie music!) becomes our conductor. isn’t the word conductor so apt here? leading the edit, our emotions and our understanding of surrender and control, unanimity and trance, performance and what? what is the opposite of performance? (ask the sun.)” – Stephanie Barber, Juror, Onion City Experimental Film Festival 2025



“A rhapsody of striking, foreboding architecture and blurred bodies, exploring connections between mental illness, public performance, and the feminine.” –Drew Durepos, Juror, Onion City Experimental Film Festival 2025



"Filled with haunting imagery and exploring the idea of mass hysteria, Full Out expresses the idea of the body being both a vulnerable and powerful thing." –CK, Wisconsin Film Festival, 2025





Screenings:
2025 Institute for Contemporary Arts, Your Ecstatic Self, London, UK
2025 Museum of the Moving Image, First Look, Astoria, NY
2025 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick-Upon-Weed, UK
2025 Images Festival, Toronto, ON
2025 Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago, IL
2025 Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens, OH
2025 Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison, WI
2025 Florida Film Festival, Sunspots: Visions from the Avant Garde, Orlando, FL
2025 Wide Open Experimental Film Festival, Oklahoma City, OK
2025 Milwaukee Film Festival, Milwaukee, WI

Awards:
2025 Best Use of Sound, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens, OH
2025 Honorable Mention, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago, IL
2025 New Cinema Arts Award, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick, UK