Director's Biography

Robert Lemelson
Director & Producer

A documentary filmmaker and psychological anthropologist, Dr. Robert Lemelson's work focuses on personal experience, culture, and mental illness in Indonesia and the United States.  

Dr. Lemelson received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a research anthropologist in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience.

With an area of specialty in Southeast-Asian studies, psychological anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, Dr. Lemelson was a Fulbright scholar in Indonesia, where he explored the relation of culture to mental illness and has worked for the World Health Organization on issues facing the country. 

Robert Lemelson has been filming in the country on the islands of Bali and Java since 1997, exploring the relation of culture to such disorders as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

 “40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy” is the first of a series of documentary films Dr. Lemelson intends to produce that are based on his research in Indonesia. 

Dr. Lemelson is currently in post-production on a series of three documentary films about how three individuals, Kereta, Estu, and Gusti, with mental disorders from different families and communities come to define, understand, and treat their illness and how that significantly affects their outcome of each person. 

Moreover, Dr. Lemelson is in the planning stages on three individual projects on psychosis outcome, gender-based violence, and trance and possession in Indonesia and the United States.

Visit Elemental Productions for more information about current and future projects.

  "Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives"