You're Looking at Me Like I Live Here and I Don't The First Film Shot in an Alzheimer's Care Unit
You're Looking At Me
You're Looking At Me Like I Live Here And I Don't is the first documentary to be filmed entirely in an Alzheimer's care unit, and also the first told entirely from the perspective of a woman living with Alzheimer's disease. The film received its national television broadcast on PBS' Emmy Award-winning Independent Lens series, and has garnered acclaim from both medical professionals and film critics.
In Danville, California, Lee Gorewitz wanders on a personal odyssey through her Alzheimer's & Dementia care unit. From the moment she wakes up, Lee is on a quest - for reminders of her past and of her identity. A total immersion into the fragmented day-to-day experience of mental illness, You're Looking At Me Like I Live Here And I Don't is an Alzheimer's documentary filled with charismatic vitality and penetrating ruminations that challenge our preconceptions of illness and aging. Here is one extraordinary woman who will not let us forget her, even as she struggles to remember herself.
"This riveting film grabbed my attention immediately and held it through the final scene. When it ended I felt sad -- not because of the subject matter but because I wanted to spend more time with this unique and endearing woman with whom I'd fallen in love. I missed her, so I turned around and watched the entire movie again." - Marie Marley, Huffington Post
"Deeply moving [and] unforgettable!" - PBS
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In the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer’s unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film — I was making the wrong film. Writing a fictional Alzheimer’s narrative — creating a ...Read more
In the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer’s unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film — I was making the wrong film. Writing a fictional Alzheimer’s narrative — creating a neat and orderly plot whose course I could control, from a disease by nature chaotic and nonlinear — was impossible. In the way that a son or daughter doesn’t know exactly what to expect during a visit with a parent who has Alzheimer’s, it’s inconceivable (some might even say ridiculous) for a screenwriter to map out the trajectory of a scene in an Alzheimer’s unit, and expect it to play itself out in a manner remotely resembling what was written.
Other than the loose structure provided by a schedule of daily activities — a parachute toss, the hair salon, an oldies sing-a-long — life in an Alzheimer’s unit does not follow the logic of the real world. It is founded upon the incidental and accidental, a string of interactions and experiences that digress unpredictably, omnidirectionally and constantly turn back on themselves. The Alzheimer’s unit almost never adheres to the continuity of the linear narratives that we enjoy on a daily basis — or that screenplays require.
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