Tokyo Soteria is an NPO which provides support to people with mental disabilities in Edogawa. For World Mental Health Day it organized an integrated painting exhibition, talk session and film festival event, inviting the director and performers of Arte e Salute, a professional theater group made up of patients from Italy’s Emilia-Romagna regional health united organization Bologna mental health service together with organization associates who collaborate with and support the theater group, as well as mental health care and welfare workers from Myanmar.

To create the stage piece “Marat/Sade” performed by people with disabilities, Tokyo Soteria recruited and auditioned potential Japanese participants from across the country in September 2019. Rehearsals began in Japan in May 2020, and in 2021 Tokyo Soteria put the finishing touches to the piece as a complete work, editing per-scene video footage taken in a variety of locations. This year, as well as screening the video work as part of its film festival project, Tokyo Soteria also held a film festival featuring video works by people with mental disabilities from Myanmar and Italy. At the same time, it held an exhibition of paintings and a workshop on creative activities as projects to demonstrate and promote creative expression by people with disabilities. Rather than stopping at a one-sided form of expression, the idea was to give a talk session and strengthen understanding of the project in context, including the environment for expressive activities, and the current state of the mental health field.