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Home and Community in Later Life

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11Mar

Some Kind of Heaven

The overriding question that this new feature-length documentary may trigger for viewers is: What is the meaning of life in its later years? Some Kind of Heaven follows the lives of four older individuals who are living in The Villages, a huge and sprawling retirement community an hour north of Orlando, Florida.
31Jan

I Won’t Go

Oli Truss is a single older housebound woman in her nineties who lives alone in her rural home somewhere in Britain. As a child, videographer Georgina Hurcombe was her neighbor. She recalls the animals running around on Oli’s property and how “she used to teach me math after school.” That was 15 years ago.
31Jan

Forever, Chinatown

Emmy-nominated Forever, Chinatown is the most enchanting and salutary documentary film I have ever viewed. Director James Chan explores the remarkable psychological and physical embodiment of “sense of place” exuded by the artistic creations of 81-year-old artist Frank Wong.
11Oct

Grow Old Along with Me: The Poetry of Aging – Part 2

Few poets celebrate aging as exuberantly as Robert Browning in Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.” Browning’s optimistic sentiments are purposefully embodied in the title and content of this lovely film produced by videographers Anne Macksoud and John Ankele.
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.
11Jul

Diane

Diane is one of those rare films that reflects human life as it is—in all its personal complexity—rather than one of the more commonly gratuitous films that present excessively dramatized/glamorized views of life as many wish it to be.
11Jun

95 And 6 To Go

In 95 And 6 To Go, videographer Kimi Takesue introduces us to her grandfather, Mr. Tom Takesue, a 95-year-old Japanese American and resident of Hawaii. Videographer Kimi has returned to Hawaii to provide him with “support and assistance” due to the recent death of his wife, Ethel.
11Feb

Quilts in Women’s Lives

Quilters. What comes to mind? If you do not quilt and know little about those who do, perhaps you see an image of a frail old woman wearing a lavender dress with a lace collar. She is seated in a rocker and stitching with needle and thread (Fons, 2018).
31Jan

The Babushkas of Chernobyl (reviewed by Rick Scheidt)

There is a magnetic attraction in the stories of elders, who by choice or happenstance, face unique, and extreme life scenarios that exceed the imaginations of those of us who live securely under the thicker part of the normal curve. The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a riveting watershed for gerontologists.
11Jan

That Evening Sun

That Evening Sun, based on a short story by William Gay, tells the story of an old Tennessee farmer’s struggle to reclaim his farm and home. Widower Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) ends up in a nursing home after slipping on a patch of ice and breaking a hip.
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).
08Oct

Still Life

Said Ismael Otruk is an 83 year-old Palestinian man born in the town of Acre in the 1930s. Now part of Israel, Acre is approximately 4,000 years old—“one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world”. Said and his family were forced to move from Acre during the Palestinian resettlement of 1948.
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.
04Aug

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a wonderfully composed film about the reuniting of an older Chinese father with his only daughter after years of continental separation.
08Feb

The Stone Angel

The Stone Angel (Skogland, 2007), based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author, Margaret Laurence, takes us on a life review through the eyes and memories of its main character, 90 year old Hagar Shipley (Ellen Burstyn). Faced with undefined health issues, she fiercely resists the attempts of her son and his wife to move her into a nursing home.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood