Familiar Touch

Familiar Touch is a coming of (old) age film. It follows an octogenarian woman’s transition to life in assisted living as she contends with her conflicting relationship to herself and her caregivers amidst her shifting memory, age identity, and desires.

Familiar Touch experiments with the markers of the coming of age genre to consider how we are all always coming of age. Narratives of older adults are peripheral in our culture, as if desire, dreams, and agency decay long before our bodies and minds do. As feminist scholar Lynne Segal writes, “as we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age.” Our film resides in that vertigo, as our protagonist Ruth not only disavows the roles expected of her—Mother, Patient, Old Lady—but her “appropriate” age identity, sliding between feeling 85 and 25. I began writing Familiar Touch shortly after my grandmother died after living with dementia for many years. At the end of her life, I became troubled by my family preemptively mourning her death. The erosion of her linguistic acuity prompted them to declare her “no longer there,” and yet her sense of self was expressed through embodied forms, such as rhythmic tapping and humming. Six years later, I began working as a caregiver to New York City artists with memory loss. I learned not only to read my clients’ bodies, but also to configure my own to affirm their social identities. Some days they treated me as their assistant, others as a granddaughter or friend. I enacted the intimacy they needed through gesture and touch. Drawing on my background as a choreographer and dance-filmmaker, Familiar Touch is told through the precise and quotidian choreography of Ruth, our protagonist, and the physical language of caregiving. We made Familiar Touch in collaboration with the residents and staff of Villa Gardens, a continuing care retirement community in California, who participated as both cast and crew.

PRODUCTION 1: Alexandra Byer - Rathaus Films LLC
740 Madison Street
11221, Brooklyn, United States of America
Tel. +1 617-519-3902
hello@rathausfilms.com

PRODUCTION 2: Matthew Thurm - Go For Thurm Inc. 216 N. 8th Street, 1R
11211, Brooklyn, United States of America
Tel. +1 914-715-9837
matthewcthurm@gmail.com

INTERNATIONAL PRESS OFFICE: WOLF Consultants - Gordon Spragg & Michael Arnon
Tel. +49 171 6466970
hello@wolf-con.com
www.wolf-con.com

NORTH AMERICAN PRESS OFFICE: Layla Hancock-Piper
Cinetic Marketing (US Press Office)
layla@cineticmedia.com