Zach Kornfeld has been making videos with The Try Guys for a decade on YouTube, and they have been viewed by millions of people. But premiering his short film “OUCH!” at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal feels much more intense.
“It’s funny to me. I’m used to 100,000 people seeing something, but the idea of 200 people in one room scares me,” Kornfeld said.
In 2017, Kornfeld was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that causes significant pain to those suffering from it.
In “OUCH!” he uses a variety of visuals to explain the pain that he experiences and also some of the emotional and mental load of dealing with an invisible illness.
The film depicts a friend suggesting that Zach just try yoga, and then we see that friend being sucked into a dark room. “Sometimes, when you are in a bad place, you take it out on others who don’t deserve it, and that’s not fair. It’s not their fault, and they are not the ones making your life worse.”
Kornfeld recognizes that chronic pain is difficult because you’re constantly looking for a cure. “I can only speak from my experience, but I know that when I got diagnosed, I was thrilled because I finally had an answer, and to me, that meant I would be able to find that one silver bullet that would make everything go away.”
He listed some of the things he thought might be a fix.
“For years, I thought it was my medicine. Then I thought it’d be my second medicine, then my third, and my fourth. Then I said, ‘OK, well, it’s not the medicine, but it’ll be the diet,’ and then no, it will be the exercise, and then it will be the mind-body connection, and then, oh no, actually, it’ll be this crystal healing map that I bought that has PEMF, whatever. And the reality is, there is no silver bullet. It is a lifestyle change.”
Even though Kornfeld has made a film very specific to his journey, he does not mention his disease by name in the movie.
“This is a film that is about my specific experience with ankylosing spondylitis. It is about living with an invisible illness, but it is also, hopefully, broadly applicable to anyone with any disability, any chronic pain condition, even a mental health disorder,” he said. “I believe that specifics make films more universal. I wanted to make this very specific to my pain, to my experience, but I felt that by naming my disease, it brought too much attention to it and that by letting you read the name but bleeping it, it gave you just enough distance where you could then hopefully project your own experiences onto the pain I’m experiencing on screen.”
There is a toolkit that is present throughout the film, and Kornfeld sees that as the way that he copes with his disease.
“I’m going to lean on the things that I’ve loved growing up, which are genre movies and B movies,” he said. “And trying to reference specific shots that my brain has misremembered from some movie I watched in my friend’s basement when I was 10 years old, the things that terrified me but titillated me and delighted me. The box is the collection of everything that I am and who I love, what I love, and what makes me, me; and is an antidote to the pain that I feel. It’s very easy in your darkest days to define yourself by your pain, by what ails you, by what’s going wrong in your life.
“When I’m having a flare-up, that is who I am, or at least it feels that way. But that’s not true. That’s not who I am. I’m so much more than that. And the box is reflective of that. It’s a reminder to myself that these things I love are the antidote.”
