Almost Home
Health & Wellness • 1h 23m
Directed by Brad Lichtenstein, Lisa Gildehaus • Documentary • 2005 • 84 minutes
Almost Home rescues from an exile of denial the real stories of aging that lie in the vast middle between the uber-heroic octogenarian marathoner and the feeble geriatric that most Americans fear becoming. A feature length, cinema-verité film shot on location in a continuing care community that boasts a nursing home transforming its medical (think hospital) model of care into a holistic one (think home), Almost Home is a stunningly intimate film that combines the institution’s struggle to shake the nursing home stigma with tender, sometimes difficult, stories of people who live, work and visit there.
The film follows one couple bonded by Alzheimer’s and another divided by Parkinson’s; children torn between caring for their parents and caring for their children; nursing assistants doing unsavory work for poverty wages while juggling precarious lives at home; healthy elders fearful of moving to the dreaded nursing home; and a visionary nursing home director trying to transform a century-old hospital-like institution into a true home. It all adds up to a dramatic and surprising story about aging where that grips you from the start, never flinches from reality — good and bad — and offers hope where you might have thought there was none.
Up Next in Health & Wellness
-
Away from Meaning (Lejos del sentido)
Directed by Olivia Luengas • Documentary • 2020 • 88 minutes
When Liliana was three years old, she suffered from viral encephalitis. As a consequence, she began to experience borderline personality disorder years later. Along with her family, she devotes herself to managing and coping with emoti...
-
Celling Your Soul
Directed by Joni Siani • Documentary • 2017 • 48 minutes
In one short decade, we have totally changed the way we interact with one another. The millennial generation, the first to be socialized in a digital world, is now feeling the unintended consequences.
CELLING YOUR SOUL is a powerful and i...
-
Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Directed by Deborah Hoffmann • Documentary • 1995 • 44 minutes
With profound insight and a healthy dose of levity, COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER chronicles the various stages of a mother's Alzheimer's Disease and the evolution of a daughter's response to the illness. The desire to cure the in...