In Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) is living with dementia and is brought to an assisted living facility by the man she can’t quite recognize as her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin). As she floats between moments of lucidity and confusion, she begins to acclimate to her new surroundings.
Awards Buzz spoke with Friedland about how this film came about and turned into the finished product:
“It’s a combination of personal and professional reasons. It started with my paternal grandmother. She was a poetry editor and an intellectual and someone whose sense of self was very much rooted in her linguistic expression. Language was everything to her, and when she developed dementia, she became non-verbal after a few years. My family, in their grief, started speaking about her in the past tense. I think this is very common, how we talk about people with memory loss that they’re not there, and yet she was so physically expressive. She would rock. She would reach out to touch you. She would tap rhythms on her lap. That gap between the person that we spoke about as absent and the person who was very much still there but expressing herself more in embodied ways haunted me for many years after she passed.”
“Cut to about a decade later. I had been working in the film industry doing every entry-level job you can on a set and reached a point where I felt like I wasn’t learning about people anymore and that if I wanted to make humanist dramas, I needed to meet people that weren’t just directors. I needed a day job and I started working as a caregiver doing home memory care, mainly for artists and creatives living in New York. That job really changed everything I thought I knew about aging and memory loss and the intimacy of care labor. That’s where I got the idea for this film being a coming of old age film and rearranging the perspective of how most films are that portray this stage of life. They’re always from the perspective of people around the older adults and so I wanted to bring it into Ruth’s perspective and see it as a transition rather than a loss a loss of self.”
Watch the video above to hear about the pleasure of working with Chalfant, filming in a real-life assisted living facility, and a small preview of what she’s doing next.
Familiar Touch is streaming on MUBI and available on VOD.
