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Caregiving and Assistance

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11Nov

I Care a Lot

Under the guise of benevolent guardianship, certain individuals in this country have learned how to use the legal system to steal the savings and property of vulnerable older adults after consigning them to a long-term care facility. These are not just a handful of bad-apple people; scores of them are operating throughout the United States—but just how many, no one knows.
16Sep

Life in Stills

The themes of memory, love, and loss that are central to Angel’s Perch are also found in the documentary film, Life in Stills , but with a different mixture. The grandmother–grandson relationship in this film is of an entirely different character than that presented in Angel’s Perch .
11Aug

Nourish the Body and Soul

Nourish the Body and Soul is a well-crafted, solution-filled, uplifting video that shows long-term care providers ways to enhance dining experiences of residents in their facilities. Produced by Action Pact, a culture change company, the film illustrates innovative, context-specific dining options currently used in a dozen nursing homes across the United States.
19Mar

Elizabeth is Missing

The opening scenes in Elizabeth Is Missing are a master class in concise character development.
11Feb

Will Power

Will Power is a film about a saddening and dissolving family occurrence. Videographer and narrator Tom Garber shares with us his involvement in a contentious legal battle between himself and his siblings over opposing inheritance claims made on the family homeplace following the death of their parents.
11Nov

The Mole Agent

Have you ever wished to be a “fly on the wall” in a residential care facility so you could observe the kind of care being given to a family member, or just to see the kind of dynamic being played out between residents and staff? Watching The Mole Agent will give you a sense of what that would be like.
11Jun

Fighting for Dignity

Fighting for Dignity, directed by Eilon Caspi and Judy Berry, is a provocative, and, at times, shocking video about injurious and fatal resident-to-resident incidents in long-term care. Viewer discretion is advised at the outset due to some scenes containing graphic images of victim injuries and acts of violence resulting in serious physical injury.
29Mar

Head Full of Honey

Many contemporary films that deal with dementia focus on the role of the caregiver and the complex issues involved in supporting a family member living with dementia. Head Full of Honey falls into this category, but is unusual in having a youthful protagonist in the central caring role.
11Feb

From Nine to Ninety

From Nine to Ninety deals with a common family situation in the United States—providing care for older adults within a multigenerational household setting. It focuses on a single family that shares the common challenges faced by many other families that currently struggle with adult caregiving.
21Jan

My Father’s House: A Journey of Love and Memory

At one point in this remarkable film, 89-year-old Dr. Peter Reimann, accompanied on piano by daughter Hannah Reimann, sings this brief German art song from Schubert’s Die Winterreise No. 15. The Raven (Die Krähe).
06Sep

What They Had

In the opening scenes of this captivating film, an older woman gets out of bed in the dark, gets partially dressed, and walks out of the house in a light jacket into a snowy night. The shot holds on her walking down the street for several seconds until she disappears into a shower of heavy snowfall. A wife/mother has disappeared, setting off panic on the part of her husband and children.
10Oct

I, Daniel Blake

Shot and directed in such a way as to feel very much like an unscripted documentary, I, Daniel Blake has a feel of immediacy that places the viewer right alongside the characters in the film, experiencing and feeling what they are living.
10Aug

Care

The new documentary, Care, aired recently on the WORLD Channel’s America ReFramed series, is the first documentary I know of that takes a deeply personal and behind the scenes look at the workings of the care-at-home system in the United States. It presents the stories of four elderly care-at-home recipients (three of these are in urban New York and one in rural Pennsylvania).
04Dec

Angel’s Perch

Angel’s Perch opens with a close-up shot of a young woman sleepily protesting having a cell phone camera recording her. The person with the camera responds “We’re going to want to remember these things someday.” Then, taking out a family heirloom ring, he proposes to the suddenly wide awake woman.
04Oct

Wrinkles

Life in a long-term care facility is rarely explored in narrative films. A couple of exceptions to this, Quartet and Assisted Living , were recently reviewed in this journal ( Vanden Bosch, 2013 ). This topic remains one of the frontiers we do not enjoy visiting in our culture.
29Jun

Mum and me

There has been a modest but notable increase in the number of fiction and nonfiction films addressing the subject of dementia in recent decades. Scottish documentary maker Sue Bourne’s 2008 film, Mum and Me, fits firmly into this burgeoning nonfiction subgenre.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood