Aging Well Together Documentary Film Festival
Thanks to all who joined our festival and participated in our film discussions!
If you missed them live, you can view the discussion recordings here:
with Diane Rehm, Dr. David Grube, film director Joe Fab and executive producer Diane Naughton
with film director Kimi Takesue and Dr. Rashmita Basu
Life and Death in Assisted Living
with Laura Jett and Amanda Biggs from the Mid-East Commission Area Agency on Aging
About the films:
“Life and Death in Assisted Living”
More and more elderly Americans are spending their later years in assisted living, which has sprung up as an alternative to nursing homes. But is this loosely regulated, multi-billion-dollar industry putting seniors at risk? In an investigation with ProPublica, FRONTLINE examines the nation’s largest assisted living company, raising questions about the drive for profits and fatal lapses in care.
“95 AND 6 TO GO”
In 95 AND 6 TO GO, a resilient widower’s memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay his granddaughter is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination.
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i in the 1910s. Amidst the solitude of his home routines – coupon clipping, rigging an improvised barbecue, lighting firecrackers on the New Year – we glimpse an unexpectedly rich inner life. As his granddaughter queries his history of love and loss, a stalled film project becomes a collaborative inquiry into mortality and how one constructs a personal narrative with memories that span almost a century. Shot over six years in Honolulu, this intimate meditation on absence and family expands the vernacular of the “home movie” to consider how history is accumulated in the everyday and how sparks of humor and creativity can animate an ordinary life.
“When My Time Comes”
When My Time Comes depicts Diane Rehm’s exploration of the issue of medical aid in dying (MAID). This is an option for terminally ill patients with six months or less to live who are able to make their own medical decisions and meet certain other legally prescribed criteria. Available to over 20% of the U.S. population, it is an option that John Rehm, Diane’s husband of 54 years, wanted before he died in 2014, but could not have.
The film tells Diane and John’s story, as well as the stories and perspectives of others as Diane sets out to discover as much as she can about MAID. Viewers will learn what Diane learns, right alongside her, in a series of conversations with patients, family members, physicians, clergy, and lawmakers. A diversity of viewpoints is represented — pro, con, and undecided.
The film will help Americans understand what MAID actually is, and what it is not. Medical aid in dying is not suicide, euthanasia, or many of the other things with which it is sometimes confused. The film will also encourage people to have conversations with their family and their physicians about what they want at the end of their lives, and to have those conversations early.
As Diane testified before the Maryland House of Delegates, “If you believe that God alone should decide when and how you will die, we support you 100%. If you wish to make use of every tool medical science can offer to prolong your life as long as possible, we support you 100%. And if you wish to have medical aid in dying in order to have some control over your death, we support you 100% as well.”
Have questions? Please contact healthyaging@ecu.edu.