Media Project 1 Research

The documentary Grandad, Dementia and Me starts off with archive footage of his grandfather, and then switches between present day and the past a few times before revealing the title. The reveal of having it switch between this past ‘dreamlike’ state and real life is contrasting these two differing times, but also gives the audience an idea of what ‘Grandad’ is feeling, not know whats going on, continuously switching between a mindset that is cemented in the past and a mindset that is constantly fighting the reality of dementia and its connotations.

This documentary was heartfelt and obviously very personal to the filmmaker, however we only ever found clips of the documentary online and were unable to find a full copy, so I emailed the company that produced the film asking for a copy and they were kind enough to send it to us.

The documentary really established the closest documentation of a father-son dynamic that was related to dementia that we could find, and it delivered. We uncovered the harshness of the disease and the way it robs the patient of all independence.

In this film we follow the lives of 4 people who have dementia and are in different stages of the disease, we find out that a lot of dementia patients have boards where they have to write down what they have to do for that day, and have memory triggers so they don’t forget important information like family and daily routines eg. having a medication/pill box next to the kettle so that they don’t forget where it is.

Emotions are not damaged by Alzheimer’s, if anything they are increased and magnified, sometimes to the point of extreme hysteria as a lot of dementia patients in this film seem to describe Alzheimer’s as a memory fog rather than a complete brain fog. Keith describing his Alzheimer’s as being able to remember more clearly feelings rather than actual memories.

People who look at themselves as very independent seem to be a lot more frustrated that they can’t do things themselves as Alzheimer’s progresses, which triggers them to establish routine a lot more vigorously in their lives, if it hadn’t been before.

Alanna Shaikh talks in this lecture about her father and his Alzheimer’s and how she is preparing to get Alzheimer’s herself. We learn that patients of Alzheimer’s find comfort in the familiar, as would be expected as they lose familiarity with the shrinking of the brain, and enjoy doing things that they inherently know how to do, in Alanna’s fathers case it is filling out forms.

We learn how Alanna is teaching herself hobbies and skills that will hopefully help her as she enters Alzheimer’s, making spending time with herself more interesting as she eventually won’t be able to recognize her friends.

Alanna also talks about how her fathers Alzheimer’s didn’t take away from the person that he was before, that he was still loving and still caring. I feel we could flip this on its head, and use our character of the father as still spiteful and mean to his son despite his son taking care of him, having a real clash of morals with the character of the son.

In this 8min documentary we follow a husband over the course of 4 years, looking after his wife who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 61 in 2009.

The biggest thing I took from this documentary is how Alzheimer’s patients act in their day to day life, the way they move when they start fading away faster and faster – shuffling, and clutching onto anything near them to keep balance if they are old – and how their loved ones react, scared of the smile of recognition disappearing one day, counting their blessings. We could integrate these facts about Alzheimer’s with our film by telling our actors how hard hit their character should be feeling.

The documentary ‘Alive Inside’ really pulls on heart strings, it explores the life of Dan Cohen, and his push for use of music in dementia and mental health patients. Throughout the film we meet several patients within the ward, one of which had not responded to any stimuli for 2 years and as soon as music was introduced she started moving and dancing. – Within our film group we discussed using music within our film to possibly trigger and induce hallucinations for the main character, as we learnt from the film that music activates more parts of the brain at the same time than any other stimulus.