Stolen Time

Film: Stolen Time (85 minutes)

Director: Helene Klodawsky

Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and Intuitive Pictures

Available on several streaming platforms

Release date: 2023

Reviewed by: Jim VandenBosch, MA and Eilon Caspi, PhD

 

The issues highlighted in this film are so overwhelming that they cannot be acknowledged without some mixture of anger and despair. Stolen Time tells the story of a lawyer’s effort to hold three major for-profit nursing home corporations accountable for substandard care—an issue that recent research once again links directly to for-profit ownership models (Orewa et al., 2025).

Since 2018, Melissa Miller, a personal injury lawyer with a large law firm in Toronto, had been handling individual suits against nursing homes on behalf of individuals who were harmed in those homes. Seeing the same kind of harm and neglect over and over, she decided to put together a mass tort case (separate but similar claims filed against one party) targeting three of the largest corporations that own nursing homes in Canada—Revera Inc., Extendicare, and Sienna Senior Living.

Shot over a four-year period, the film shows Miller working with some of the families whose cases will be part of the mass tort. Interspersed with those scenes, we also hear from several professionals who have either worked in long-term care homes or have researched and examined the underlying structures, values, and societal ageism that allow the persistently substandard care in many for-profit nursing homes to continue. What comes up again and again is how the investment-based drive for high returns affects the quality of care.

For Revera, there is a deep and unsettling irony in their profit-taking from nursing homes. Revera is wholly owned by the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, a Canadian Crown corporation that manages the pension funds of all federal employees throughout Canada. While these federal employees’ pensions benefit financially from Revera’s operations, the nursing homes owned by Revera have repeatedly been documented as providing substandard care. The very company that provides high returns for public sector workers’ pensions also withholds care from its nursing home residents, many of whom might be the parents or a spouse of those workers.

A conversation between Miller and Jason Ward, principal analyst at the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research, provides more insight into why nursing home ownership is so profitable. Jason outlines how several large nursing home corporations generate huge profits by separating the business into two entities: one that operates the caregiving facilities and another that owns the land and buildings. The operating company that runs the nursing homes pays rent to the property-owning entity, often under long-term lease agreements. This allows investors in the property-owning company to collect steady rental income that is often set at higher-than-normal rates. Because rent is part of the operating expense covered by government funding streams like Medicaid in the United States and provincial funding in Canada, substantial public care dollars ultimately flow to property owners and investors rather than remaining within the caregiving entity where they could be used for more staffing and better care (Rau, 2017). Research in both the United States and Canada shows that higher rent burdens and dual ownership structures are correlated with lower staffing levels, and that staffing levels are consistently one of the strongest predictors of care quality in nursing homes (Harrington, Dellefield et al., 2020; Harrington, Mollot et al., 2020; National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, 2022).

Stolen Time successfully portrays the depth and scope of the human pain and suffering caused by the systemic failure of corporations to provide adequate care in nursing homes. As it weaves together the comments from professionals and frontline workers, the central thread of the film is Miller’s ongoing work on the cases she is preparing for the mass tort. For the most part, this interweaving structure works quite well. There are times, though, that the film focuses too much on the persona of the attorney, which detracts from the main themes in the film.

The film also spends a lot of its 85 minutes on atmospheric and impressionistic visuals. Shots of foggy cityscapes with towering buildings and exteriors of residential care homes at night add some symbolic resonance to the issues at hand. These images also serve to create some buffering space within the often heavy and overwhelming issues confronted in Miller’s work. But the repeated use of these visuals may at times feel overdone and distracting.

The biggest disappointment is how the film sputters to an anti-climactic ending. Throughout the film, viewers are given glimpses of Miller’s work on the mass tort case. This leads the viewer to think that this work may finally come to a conclusion, and we will learn whether the mass tort case she is trying to build was successful or not. Instead, the film concludes with a conversation with just one of the individual clients we have followed in the film. On a Zoom call between Miller, this client, and her daughter, we learn that there was an out-of-court settlement of her case. And that’s the end. There is no discussion about or explanation regarding the status of the mass tort case. There is simply a brief line of text on the screen:

Melissa’s mass torts continue. And as her independent caseload expands, more and more families demand change.

It is understandable that the film, after being in production for over four years, had to come to a close rather than waiting any longer for the slow judicial process to unfold. But this could have been built into the ongoing flow of the film with some comments or text along the way that prepared the viewer for this conclusion.

Despite its occasionally choppy presentation and distracting focus on attorney Miller, Stolen Time is an important film that brings much-needed exposure to the shocking negligence that occurs daily in corporately owned long-term care homes.

References

Harrington, C., Dellefield, M. E., Halifax, E., Fleming, M. L., & Bakerjian, D. (2020). Appropriate nurse staffing levels for U.S. nursing homes. Health Services Insights, 13, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1178632920934785

Harrington C., Mollot R., Edelman T. S., Wells J., Valanejad D. (2020). U.S. nursing home violations of international and domestic human rights standards. International Journal of Health Services: planning, Administration, Evaluation, 50, 62–72. 10.1177/0020731419886196

National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care. (2022). Staffing matters [Fact sheet]. https://theconsumervoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Staffing-Matters.pdf

Orewa, G. N., Karabukayeva, A., Pradhan, R., Jimoh, I., & Weech-Maldonado, R. (2025). The effects of private equity ownership in U.S. nursing homes quality and financial performance: A systematic review. Health Policy, 161, 105388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2025.105388

Rau, J. (2017). Care suffers as more nursing homes feed money into corporate webs. KFF Health News. https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/care-suffers-as-more-nursing-homes-feed-money-into-corporate-webs/

Oxford University Press / The Gerontological Society of America. Reproduced with permission of the author. Originally published in The Gerontologist, Volume 66, Issue 5, May 2026, gnag039, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnag039