“Amour” or “The Father” this is not. Where the much-lauded of the few films tackling dementia without sentimentality take us to the worst horizon of degenerative disease, “Familiar Touch” adopts a more delicate approach. Writer/director Sarah Friedland’s deftly choreographed — literally, as Friedland comes to the film as a choreographer herself who works with aging adults — follows character actress and Tony winner Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth. She’s a once-vibrant Southern California octogenarian now slipping away to dementia.
After her son (H. Jon Benjamin) moves her into a Los Angeles memory care facility, Ruth, a former cook who still knows her recipe for Borscht note by note, must become acquainted with her surroundings — and with connections made with patient, nonjudgmental care workers (Carolyn Michelle and Andy McQueen). Even as she, in her dementia, feels betrayed by the son she had already started to forget.
“Familiar Touch” is a sales title at the 2024 Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, where discovery features from emerging filmmakers compete for their own set of film awards. With this film, Friedland wants to challenge notions of how older adults become peripheral in our culture — she based the film around a paternal grandmother who died 12 years ago but also grappled with dementia. By the time she died, Friedland’s relatives had already prematurely mourned her death.
“When she became nonverbal, my family started using the past tense to describe her when she moved into memory care,” Friedland told IndieWire. “I was in high school at the time, and I had started studying dance and was just really struck by the contrast between her sense of self that was expressed through her embodiment, through her gestures, posture, touch, and the sort of past tense of how we talked about her because of her cognitive function.”
Friedland, who has worked in creative aging for the last eight years as a caregiver to artists with dementia and a teaching artist for intergenerational films, added, “Many years later and having worked with older adults, I have come to think about identity not just being expressed through our cognition and through our language, but about self-expression and identity also [as] something embodied and physical.”
Friedland said she wanted to “push back against the idea that [her grandmother] was no longer there or that she was absent,” and so “Familiar Touch” shows us the sides of Ruth’s experience often shut out of other narratives surrounding older adult care. That she’s not gone even if she’s out of mind for some now that she’s living in a care facility.
Making a 2017 short film “Home Exercises” — “a sort of dance film with older adults in their home” — Friedland realized how much the “non-professional performers were curious about the filmmaking process itself, not just the performing element, and so that led me to start trying to teach filmmaking to older adults, not just make films with them in collaboration… With ‘Familiar Touch,’ it became clear to me that, in telling this anti-ageist coming-of-old-age character study … we had to make it in collaboration with older adults and care workers.”
So the crew held a five-week filmmaking workshop for the residents at the Pasadena retirement community Villa Gardens, where the film shot. “If you were directing one week, you were acting the next,” said Friedland, who brought the real-life Villa Gardens residents into the film as characters.
“What was really special was seeing people fall in love with these different departments. So some people came in thinking they wanted to write and actually discovered that they really loved [something else],” she said.
We see Ruth in moments of clarity — like recounting that Borscht recipe — and then moments of being awash, lost, like when she flees the care facility in confusion. “I I know that [Kathleen Chalfant’s] best friend Sybil, who’s a playwright, has dementia. And so I know that she drew upon her experience with her best friend to play this character.”
Friedland added, “People think about aging spaces as spaces of death and decline, and yes, people are living out the last years of their lives, but there’s so much joy and creativity and consciousness.”
“Familiar Touch” premieres at the Venice Film Festival on September 3. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Memento Films is handling sales.
IndieWire debuts an exclusive clip and the poster for the film below.
