Edmonton film Invisible Imagination explores aphantasia, a rare condition that blocks mental images

Picture an apple. For most people, that takes no effort. For Edmonton film and television editor Sarah Taylor, it does not work that way: she cannot visualize objects in her mind. The condition is called aphantasia, and it is the core subject of Invisible Imagination, a documentary Taylor co-wrote, directed and produced with Calgary filmmaker Anna Cooley.

The film screens at 4 p.m. Saturday at Metro Cinema, part of the fifth annual Broad View International Film Festival. Cooley has the opposite condition, hyperphantasia, and her imagination is vivid enough to be distracting, including for taste. The pair's differing minds drive the film.

Taylor, 44, and Cooley, 40, say they struggled as children for not fitting expected norms. Taylor recalls difficulty learning to read and spell, and a grade two teacher who tore a page from her notebook and made her redo it. Cooley says she got in trouble for drawing in class, though her parents told teachers she simply needed to draw to stay focused.

Taylor and her husband sometimes miscommunicate about where objects should go. He can picture whether something will fit a space; she cannot. The film also catches Taylor's mother describing how, without faces floating in her head, people who are gone are simply gone. Taylor says her family still grieves, just not in the same way.