Exeter filmmaker's moving work

‘An unexpectedly affecting film’ – The Times ‘A complex, oddly moving portrait’ – The Guardian ‘Poignant and compelling’ - Bizarre

Exeter University filmmaker Toby Amies presents
The Man Whose Mind Exploded
Picturehouse Cinema, Exeter, July 1, 6.30pm

When you can’t remember yesterday, why worry about tomorrow? The only time that matters is the present.

For Drako Zarharzar, a landmark eccentric on the Brighton scene – so well-known that you could find him on Google Maps - the philosophy of the now was a way of coping with the ‘broken recorder’ in his brain.

Robbed of the ability to create new memories by a real condition dubbed ‘Hollywood amnesia’ because of its over-worn use in implausible plotlines, Drako created an extraordinary mindscape of post-it notes, homoerotic images and postcards containing his every thought, desire and distant saucy recollection – a giant aide memoire to life.

Strung from the ceiling and plastered over the walls of his tiny council flat, this ‘exploded mind’ became over several years almost as impenetrable as Drako’s stubborn defence of his right just to be.

Exeter University filmmaker Toby Amies’s intimate feature-length documentary, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, opens on a chilly nudist beach with a 70-something tattooed Drako defiantly naked and ‘loving it all’.

But as the film progresses, a strange thing happens. We are moved to care less about his eccentricities, exotic dress sense, bright blue eyebrows, and tales from a bohemian past; instead, we worry about the candles left burning under the crazy litter of memories, the salmonella breeding ground in his fridge, the painful infection in his legs. And we wrestle between willing him to accept help and respecting his right to refuse it.

Drako is on our conscience.

“When I set out, I thought I was just going to make a biography about an extraordinary character with an extraordinary life story, who effectively lived inside a work of art,” says Toby, a veteran presenter of TV documentaries for MTV, Radio 4 and BBC2 for whom The Man Whose Mind Exploded was his first challenge as a director.

“But then I became aware that Drako was becoming more important as a person to me than the subject of the documentary. In some people’s eyes I broke the first rule of documentary filmmaking, I fell in love with my subject.”

The Man Whose Mind Exploded, which draws on interviews with Drako’s wonderfully tolerant family and closest female friend, was supported by the Wellcome Trust and struck an instant chord with professionals in health and social care when it was previewed. It has the rare distinction of being one of the few films to be reviewed in The Lancet Neurology journal, which saluted it for provoking “powerful questions about life and the minds we live it with”.

For Toby, who now stores Drako’s entire collection of memorabilia, waiting for an opportunity to display it, the film was life-changing.

The filmmaker’s obvious compassion and outright frustration at Drako’s inability to remember the simplest transactions of daily life, from missed appointments to lapsed cleaning routines and skipped medication, will chime with anyone who has struggled to care for a relative with dementia or victim, like Drako, of a traumatic brain injury.

“The film affected me enormously. Up to that point, I felt I was in total control of my own destiny,” says Toby. “But I’ve realized that part of growing up is learning you can’t change everything; learning acceptance, including accepting that someone’s autonomy is more important than my opinion of what’s “best” for them.

“If Drako’s life has a legacy – and I’m not sure he would define it like this or even be bothered about having one – it’s his simple philosophy ‘Trust Absolute Unconditional’, which allows us to find a place in the universe, and as he would have it “live completely in the now” and that seems to me to be as useful to anyone suffering dementia as it is for those caring for them.”