A new film slated to be screened at the upcoming NIC Fall Conference explores themes of memory loss and moving into a senior living community. Its creator hopes to spark new discussions about the treatment of older adults and the people who care for them.
The film, “Familiar Touch” from writer and director Sarah Friedland, follows retired cook Ruth, played by actress Kathleen Chalfant, as she moves from her private home into a senior living community with the help of her adult son, who is portrayed by actor H. Jon Benjamin.
Throughout the film, Ruth navigates her new life as a senior living resident, from doctor’s visits and daily medications to integrating into community life and rediscovering passion and purpose.
The film’s story is rooted in real-life experience. “Familiar Touch” was filmed at Villa Gardens, a life plan community managed by Front Porch in Pasadena, California, and includes many of the community’s actual residents as actors.
Friedland also drew on her personal experience in creating the film. When she was 16, her grandmother moved into a memory care wing of an assisted living community after becoming mostly non-verbal. People around Friedland’s grandmother began speaking about her “almost as if she wasn’t there.”
“She was still very expressive in other forms, particularly physical forms. She would rock and tap rhythms,” she told Senior Housing News. “That gap between the person who remained and the person that we were speaking about as if they were absent really stayed with me for many years.”
Later in life, Friedland spent more than three years as a home caregiver in New York City, where she worked with older adults living with dementia or other forms of cognitive decline. She also spent time teaching filmmaking classes at Villa Gardens, the Front Porch community where she eventually filmed Familiar Touch.
Friedland said the jobs were “transformative” in how she looked at aging in general, and informed how she wrote and directed “Familiar Touch.”
In the film, Ruth’s journey is bittersweet. As she settles into her new home in senior living, she grapples with maintaining her sense of self as her dementia progresses. The film is candid and features scenes of Ruth both joyfully reminiscing and struggling to remember. There is a particular scene where Ruth temporarily elopes from her community, a sensitive topic in the senior living industry.
But Friedland’s aim wasn’t to depict senior living in an overly good or bad light. Instead, she sought to tell an anti-ageist story rooted in empathy and humanity.
“The way that we depict older adults in our film and television doesn’t quite honor the fullness and the complexity of who they are,” Friedland said.
Friedland also hopes viewers – especially those who work for senior living operators – grasp the dedication and hard work of people who work on the front lines of senior living communities. She hopes the audience understands the importance of caring for other people in light of recent and massive cuts to Medicaid, which is imperiling access to health care for millions of older adults across the country.
In “Familiar Touch,” one character remarks that the community where Ruth lives is like a “geriatric country club,” referencing the fact that senior living is still too expensive for a wide swath of people. But looking ahead, Friedland hopes the senior living industry can be part of a movement “to create a system where everybody has access to the quality of care that Ruth has.”
“I think that means that we need to be paying care workers more,” she said. “And so I hope that we see across the industry the wages of care workers going up and there being greater protections for care workers beyond that.”
Senior living operators in attendance at the upcoming National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC) Fall Conference in September will have a chance to screen the film on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at 7 a.m.
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