Film Research: "Living With Dementia" - A Short Film/Documentary by Joe Yates

I decided upon researching into different photographic sets of images that looked into the illness of dementia, it would be a good idea and automatic link to then look into other short films created by other filmmakers and see how they tackled the issue.

I screens hotted some scenes that I found particularly inspiring and I am going to comment on them below.

The first scene begins in the bathroom, where the father is looking very confused about who he is and why he is there. In my film, I plan to capture a lot of confused and emotional faces to express the pain and anger people who suffer from dementia must feel inside. On the odd occasion, my great grandfather who suffers from early onset dementia, gets angry at his loss of short and long term memory and pulls confused and saddened faces. I want to express the emotion in my film to make people feel something.

The next scene shows the father taking some pills, which means he has been diagnosed with dementia and the doctor is trying to find a way for him to deal with it. During the duration of my film, I do not want there to be any signs of medication and means of coping with the illness, I want the illness to remain undiagnosed and unknown, making the cause of the woman's forgetfulness less obvious, relating back to my point about not spoon feeding the viewer.

Here, in this scene, the father is watching the television, and trying to change the channel with the landline phone. Then, his daughter walks in with a worried expression and replaces the phone with the remote control. The worried expression of the daughter makes me think about incorporating another character into the film, maybe a relative or neighbour who visits and looks concerned. However, with the short time frame I have to show my film in, between 80 and 240 seconds, it would be too elaborate of a concept to include narrative and conversation, especially without the correct sound recording equipment.

In the final scene, you see the father leave the house, much to the worry of his daughter, and visit what seems to be a local park or woodland area. Here, he becomes more confused and the camera angle makes the character seem erratic and confused. There are close ups of his eyes, which I already plan to include, and wider shots of his face whilst it moves around, trying to gage his location.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7vJP7dcgS8