Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29, with the World Health Organization reporting approximately 703,000 deaths worldwide each year—one every 40 seconds. Through Erik’s story, this film opens an intimate and compassionate exploration of mental health, the warning signs we often miss, and the human longing for meaning beyond loss. Rather than offering easy answers, it invites dialogue about connection, grief, and the unseen bonds that shape our lives. By centering relationships and community, the film encourages awareness, empathy, and support—reminding viewers that even in moments of profound darkness, no one is truly alone.
Channeling Erik follows a grieving mother's journey from devastating loss to unexpected dialogue — as Dr. Elisa Medhus, a physician and lifelong skeptic, turns to a medium in search of her son Erik, who died by suicide at twenty, and finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew about life, death, and love.
Some stories find you before you're ready for them.
I didn't set out to make a film about suicide. But grief has a way of accumulating in a life — not as a single wound, but as a pattern of absences. Over the years, I have sat with people I love while they stood at the edge — not knowing whether they would step back. That particular fear, of watching someone you care for disappear into a darkness you can't enter, leaves its own kind of mark. You learn to read silences differently. You become alert to what isn't said. And you carry, long afterward, the relief of their survival alongside the guilt of having almost lost them — and the knowledge that others weren't as lucky.
Western culture has few rituals for any of this. We are taught to move on, to be practical, to keep the unspeakable out of polite conversation. Death — and especially death by suicide — is handled at arm's length. We pathologize it, we reduce it to statistics, we file it away. What we rarely do is sit with it openly, or follow it somewhere unexpected.
Elisa Medhus did something different. A physician trained in evidence and reason, she didn't move on. She moved toward. And in doing so, she opened a door I found impossible not to walk through with her.
Channeling Erik is not a film about whether the paranormal is real. It is a film about what happens when a mother refuses to accept that love ends at death — and what that refusal reveals about grief, connection, and the stories we tell to survive loss. It is also, quietly, a film about the warning signs we miss, the conversations we don't know how to have, and the unbearable weight of the question: could I have done something?
Having previously explored the aftershocks of suicide within Indigenous communities in Twilight Dancers, I know how differently cultures hold this kind of grief. There is no universal script. But there is a universal longing — to know that the people we lost are, somehow, still somewhere.
This film is my attempt to honor that longing without cheapening it. To look directly at something our culture looks away from. And to ask, alongside Elisa, whether the bonds we form in life are truly severable — or whether love, in some form, persists.
In the United States alone, suicide remains the second leading cause of death among young people. Yet we have few public spaces to sit with this reality openly — to ask not just how it happens, but what it leaves behind, and what those left behind do with their grief. This film is one attempt to create that space.
Channeling Erik is a film for anyone who has ever lost someone and been left standing in the silence that follows, wondering.
Paola Marino is an Italian-Canadian filmmaker and video artist based in Toronto. Born in Bologna, she studied Film and Semiotics at the University of Bologna under philosopher Umberto Eco, graduating summa cum laude in 1995. Her work spans documentary, video art, and hybrid forms, and has screened at festivals including ImagineNATIVE, Cinequest, and the Athens International Film Festival.
Her documentary Twilight Dancers (2017), funded by the CBC, explored how Indigenous youth in a remote reservation use square dancing to heal from a community suicide epidemic — work that reflects her longstanding commitment to stories at the intersection of grief, identity, and resilience.
Marino is a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council grant and was nominated for the 2013 K.M. Hunter Artist Awards, recognized among the top eight film and video artists in Ontario. Channeling Erik is her latest documentary.
Written, Directed and Shot by Paola Marino
Produced by Paola Marino
Associate Producer Melissa Shevela
Executive Producers David Ronan Paola Marino
Edited by Paola Marino
Editing & Story Consultant Manuel Tsingaris
Editing Consultant Neil Travis Bailey
Story Consultant Sedef Altuğ, Viviana Laperchia
Conform and Color Jesse Spencer
Audio Post-Production Engineer Chad Tuthill
Illustrations by Viviana Laperchia
Music Original Score by Charlie Finley
Music ‘Seaworthy’ written and performed by Chad Tuthill
Psychic Medium Story Consultant Abbie D’Agnese
© 2026 Paola Marino / Acquamarina Productions. All Rights Reserved.
Project type: Documentary
Duration: 1h 06' 52"
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Budget: $50,000
Language: English
Country of Origin: Canada
Country of Filming: USA
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