MADISON, Wis. — Stories about anxiety, recovery and hope took over the screen Saturday as the Mental Health Warrior Film Festival returned to Madison for its second year. Held at Flix Brewhouse, the festival was created to give filmmakers a place to explore mental health through personal and fictional storytelling. Organizers said they received 70 submissions from six continents, spanning dramas, comedies, documentaries and musicals. Director and producer Patrick McHugh said the international submissions showed how people from different cultures and backgrounds can approach similar mental-health experiences in distinct ways. “It’s awesome to see where everybody’s different perspectives come from,” McHugh said, adding that he was interested in how filmmakers put their own spin on a shared subject. McHugh’s own connection to the topic deepened after he made a film about anxiety. He said he later began therapy, after graduating from college, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. “I was making a film without even knowing that I was making something about my own, personal experience,” he said. That overlap between individual experience and collective understanding is part of what McHugh values about filmmaking. The medium, he said, can turn a personal story into something audiences recognize in their own lives. Mental health advocate Brandon Hillaker said hope is a recurring theme in the films shown at the festival. He said he wants viewers to leave with a sense that difficult experiences can be survived, even when that seems impossible in the moment. “The impossible is only improbable,” Hillaker said. “Sometimes on my hardest days, surviving felt impossible, but it wasn’t and I got through it.” In addition to screening films in person, the festival served as a fundraiser for the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Wisconsin. Organizers selected 33 films for online streaming, allowing people outside Madison to watch the work and join discussions about mental health. By bringing those conversations into a community film setting, the festival offered an alternative to the silence and isolation that often surround mental illness — while giving filmmakers a public platform to share experiences that are frequently kept private.