Directed by Su Friedrich • Documentary • 2018 • 42 minutes

Su Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore—who played the lead in The Ties That Bind (1984), a film about her experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War—plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago.

Su and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out, but they cannot deny that their mother is no longer able to care for herself. Lore has severe memory loss and is convinced that her doorman has been robbing her. She often asks Su the same question repeatedly and cannot remember what she ate for breakfast. In an effort for Su and her siblings to be closer to her, they move her from her home of 50 years to an “independent living” facility in Long Island, New York.

I Cannot Tell You How I Feel is heartfelt examination of growing old in today’s society, and the responsibility of adult children to their parents.

"By candidly confronting personal struggles, Friedrich’s films invite reflections on broader, often universal concerns. This is again the case with her latest, I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, which offers a moving, tragic, frequently funny, and profoundly empathetic consideration of mortality and filial responsibility." —Giovanni Marchini Camia, Fandor