A Monthly Mental Health Film Series
Wednesday, November 20, 2013 – 7:30pm
Germany 2012. Director: David Sieveking
German filmmaker David Sieveking’s candid and touching portrait of a family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease received the Critics Week Award at Locarno.
A Song for Martin tells the story of two people late in
life who find sudden, delirious love, and then lose it in one of the
most painful ways possible — to Alzheimer’s disease. Barbara (Viveka
Seldahl), a concert violinist, and Martin (Sven Wollter), a world-famous
conductor and composer, meet for the first time when both are
middle-aged and married to others. They fall profoundly in love and soon
divorce their spouses, marry, and settle down to a joyful shared life
and musical partnership. The signs of Martin’s Alzheimer’s disease are
at first isolated, but their progression is relentless.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006 – 7:30pm
Canada 2005. Director: Allan King.
Post-screening discussion with director Allan King
Co-sponsored by the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia and the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival
Recently selected as the only documentary in Canada’s Top 10 films of 2005, Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company is Vancouver-born Allan King’s
latest “actuality drama”. With his signature documentary style of no
narration, no direction of action and no conventional interviews, Allan
King turns his attention to the subject of how ageing affects the mind,
as he follows the lives of eight elderly residents with varying
cognitive skills over four months at the Jewish Home for the Aged at
the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto.
Thursday, January 20, 2005 – 7:30 pm
Sweden 2001. Director: Bille August
Co-sponsored by the Richmond Mental Health Services Older Adult Team and the Consulate General of Sweden in Vancouver.
A Song for Martin tells the story of two people late in life who find sudden, delirious love,
and then lose it in one of the most painful ways possible – to
Alzheimer’s disease. Barbara (Viveka Seldahl), a concert violinist, and
Martin (Sven Wollter), a world-famous conductor and composer, meet for
the first time when both are middle-aged.
Thursday, January 15, 2004 – 7:30pm
UK/USA 2001. Director: Richard Eyre
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Sheila Nolan.
Based on the memoir of John Bayley, this touching drama tells the tender and extraordinary story of his enduring relationship with his wife, philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. The film begins with the unlikely romance of their early days at Oxford in the 1950s to Iris’s death from Alzheimer’s disease in 1999.
Thursday, January 16, 2003 – 7:30pm
USA, 1994. Director: Deborah Hoffmann
Post-screening discussion with Dr. Martha Lou Donnelly
Co-sponsored by the Alzheimer Society of B.C.
With
profound insight and surprising 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. As
the illness and film progress, the desire to cure the incurable gives
way to an acceptance which is finally liberating for both daughter and
mother.