Director Sarah Friedland's debut feature film, , is a deeply moving portrait of a woman with dementia adjusting to assisted living. The film explores issues around the concept of selfhood, aging and ageism, the value of caregivers, and challenges us to consider a possible culture change around how cognitive impairment and aging are perceived. The film will be screened on March 24, followed by a panel discussion and reception with Zelda Freitas (BA, BSW, MSW, SW), Clinical Senior Advisor at CIUSSS Centre-West-Island of Montreal, and Claire Webster, Certified Dementia Care Consultant (PAC) and Certified Professional Con颅sultant on Aging (CPCA).
Devon Phillips (DP): What was the idea behind the film, Familiar Touch?
Sarah Friedland (SF): The inspiration came through the convergence of personal and professional experiences. When I was about 16 years old, my paternal grandmother moved into a memory care facility after living with dementia for several years. She had been a poetry editor, someone whose sense of self was deeply rooted in her linguistic expression and when she became nonverbal, my family started speaking about her almost in the past tense. It was not out of lack of love. It was an expression of their grief. At the time, I was studying dance, and when I would visit her, she was so physically expressive鈥攕he would rock and tap rhythms. She was very much there, just expressing herself in a different form. The gap between the person who my family spoke about in absentia and the person who very much persisted but showed herself in a different way haunted me for many years after she died.
Cut to about a decade later, I had been doing every entry level film job that you can do in New York鈥攆ilm sets, production offices鈥攁nd I reached a point where I felt like if I wanted to make a humanist drama, then I needed other people and I needed a day job. So, I answered an ad for a caregiving agency that provided home care for people who had memory loss. I did a ton of homecare work for artists and creatives with dementia for about four years. That job changed everything I knew about aging and self-expression, as well as the intimacy and nuance of care. So many things in that experience really shaped the ideas in my film, Familiar Touch. That led to me training to be a teaching artist to work with older adults and to make intergenerational films. All these experiences got braided together into not only the story of Familiar Touch, but how we went about making it.
DP: Tell me about the making of Familiar Touch.
SF: We made it using a workshop process with older adults in a retirement community. I was trained by an organization called Lifetime Arts that trains teaching artists to work with older adults, including those with memory loss. We made Familiar Touch, which was scripted through a workshop collaboration with a care facility. So, for the five weeks leading up to the filming, my colleagues and I taught every aspect of filmmaking, soup to nuts: there was a workshop on acting, screenwriting, cinematography and then the residents made their own short films and they signed up for whatever cast or crew role they wanted. Others took behind the scenes roles, like background actors, so it was very much an intergenerational production. People working in different forms of creative aging, for example, art therapy, have been interested in seeing the film because of its production methodology.
DP: You mentioned how care work changed everything you knew about aging. What did that change look like for you?
SF: That work made me recognize just how pervasive ageism is, how much it shapes our everyday assumptions about older adults. One of the surprises of caring for older adults was becoming more flexible in how I thought about age identity. I noticed that my clients, who were in their 80s and 90s (I was in my early 20s at the time) didn鈥檛 see themselves as the elders and me as the younger one. There was this malleability in how they interpreted my presence in their home- some days I was a care worker, some days I was a different person to them鈥攖heir best friend, sibling, girlfriend, or assistant. That was also reflected in how they perceived the relationship between our ages. Some days, they saw me as a peer because they could identify with their own 20-something self, or they weren鈥檛 aware they were in their 80s or 90s.
What I found shifting for me was that instead of holding onto the idea that I was the younger person and they were older, I saw myself identifying with them. This helped me realize that it鈥檚 not that I am a young person and they are 鈥渙ther鈥� but that they are me in a few years, if I am lucky. I gained greater flexibility in thinking about age identity.
DP: So, you were able to see your older adults differently?
SF: So many of our narratives around decline and grief can impede seeing the person in front of you. Many loved ones have this air of grief and tragedy in how they relate to their family members with cognitive decline. I was really surprised by how much joy and creative expression existed in the day to day when I was caring for them. Dementia is not only an experience of loss and grief. Along with the memory loss came these moments of poetry that were quite unexpected and welcomed. Much love and joy exists in caregiving relationships.
DP: It鈥檚 brave to explore the space where the sense of self is changing, but still has value.
SF: Absolutely. A big component of our film was trying to co-opt the coming-of-age genre. The personalities of younger adults shift as they go into adulthood with loss of innocence and changing bodies, but we never say that younger adults are absent or that they have lost themselves, we just say that they have come of age.
So, for Familiar Touch, I wanted to steal the framing of that genre for an older character to show the experience of a self that is not only of loss, but of transfiguration, of trying to see the person who remains rather than who is absent.
The coming-of-age genre liberates the stories that we tell about older adults with memory loss from only being one of loss and into one that recognizes the self as it shifts.
DP: What questions or issues would you like the viewer to consider?
SF: One is about the sensations of selfhood. One of the ways that we get to that narrative of decline is by seeing subjectivity and selfhood as something that is only cognitive: the 鈥淚 think, therefore I am鈥� of selfhood. We are not just our brains. Our sense of self is also rooted in all our sensations. Touch and all our sensations are an important way in which we communicate and how we connect with people. So many older people experience a drought of touch. In the film, I wanted to show my main character Ruth鈥檚 sense of self largely through her body, what she tastes, touches, smells. I hope that viewers will think about their relationship to sensation as part of who they are.
I also hope that people will connect, no matter where they come from, with the components of Ruth that persist that we do not always recognize in older adults. We often diminish, for example, sexuality, desire, and ambition, but these things are still there for her and a big part of who she is. I hope people think about what components are not lost, but remain.
I think another question that is crucial is how we need to shift our culture around valuing care work. In North American culture, care work is so deeply devalued. I want to honour care labour and care workers that make other people鈥檚 lives possible.
DP: A lot of issues that have been pushed away or even made invisible have been turned inside out in your film, so we get to see them. We fear dementia and losing our sense of self. You are presenting a perspective that allows us to think about these issues differently.
SF: People find it peculiar that I am making a film about aging when I am so young, but I have come to realize that I am less scared of memory loss than I am of how our society treats people with memory loss. Older adults in general, and older women in particular, are minimized and devalued鈥攖hat terrifies me more than cognitive decline itself.We tend to think that inheritance is something that goes from elders to youngers. I recently have been thinking about it going in the opposite direction. My parents are in their 70s and on the verge of this next stage of life. I so deeply want them to inherit a culture that sees them as valuable, so they can lead meaningful lives and have the resources to support them, but that is not the culture they are inheriting. I have been thinking a lot about what younger adults owe older adults and I think, at minimum, it鈥檚 a culture change around how cognitive impairment and aging are perceived.
With the support of Palliative Care 91丝瓜视频 and the 91丝瓜视频 Council on Palliative Care, Familiar Touch will be screened on March 24 from 5-7:30 PM at the Sylvia and Richard Cruess Amphitheatre, Room ES1.1129, Glen site, RI-MUHC (metro Vendome). A panel discussion with Zelda Freitas and Claire Webster will follow, as well as a reception in the adjacent atrium. The event is in-person only and free of charge, but registration is required. to secure your spot.聽