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Home and Community in Later Life

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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.
03Jun

The Way We Get By

The Way We Get By offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of three elderly Maine Troop Greeters at the Bangor Airport. Because of its eastern-most location, the Bangor Airport has served as the major departure and arrival point of more than a million U.S. troops involved in the Iraqi and Afghanistan theaters of war.
07Oct

The Mayor

The Mayor is a film that should be viewed by every serious student of gerontology. In a display of remarkable trust, selected residents of Town Village North, a retirement community in Dallas, TX, share their daily lives—public and private thoughts, feelings, and activities—with brilliant documentarian Jared Scheib. The most intimate focus is placed upon 88-year-old Sam Berger, called “the Mayor” by other residents because of his irrepressible social largess.
08Aug

Assisted Living

Assisted Living is an engaging film—part fiction, part documentary—that takes us into the nitty-gritty of life in a long-term care facility in the United States. The film is unusually rich and perceptive in its portrayal of images and themes associated with aging in an institutional setting. It is the creation of a 22-year-old film student.
16Jun

Quartet

A new film directed by Dustin Hoffman, takes place in an upscale retirement home in the classical rolling countryside of the United Kingdom. One of the best things about the film is the ever-recurring stream of live and energetic classical music pouring out of it. Another is watching older professional performers play and/or sing this music.
08Feb

Fred Won’t Move Out

One of the biggest challenges in creating a narrative film around a character who has dementia is to convincingly portray the effects of that dementia. Dementia is usually not something one can “act” from internal experience. It can only be portrayed by closely observing the wide ranging effects that a cognitive impairment like dementia imposes.
Movies About Aging and Elderhood