For four months, Allan King and his crew accompanied a group of residents of Toronto's Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. They live there due to impairment of their cognitive abilities. Lost, Max Trachter walks Baycrest's corridors until he finds Claire Mandel, his sweetheart. Together with Claire's family and her friend Ida Orliffe, Max celebrates Claire's eightyninth birthday. The hard part comes when Claire's family leaves. Helen Mosten-Growe, once an attractive, highly successful business woman, kicks at her nurses. She expresses her rage at her daughter for putting her in Baycrest through violence. Sobbing, Fay Silverman tells a nurse how much she misses her family. She hates Baycrest and wants out. "Once again, King employs his discreet, hands-off vérité technique to observe the outward manifestations of an internal process, but such is the intimacy he establishes with his subjects that, the longer you watch them and the better you come to know them, the more strangely familiar their particular forms of memory loss take – it's like the neurological version of fingerprints. This knowledge comes purely from intense observation – both the filmmaker's and ours: we can't know what's going on behind those faces, but we can know the faces themselves, and they're as revealing as anything yielded by state-of-the-art medical technology. While that may be as close as documentary can get to anything like the truth, it's close enough." Geoff Pevere
Production: Allan King Associates Ltd., TV Ontario, Toronto
Producer: Allan King
Cinematographer: Peter Walker Musik: Robert Carli
Sound: Jason Milligan
Editor: Nick Hector
With: Claire Mandell, Max Trachter, Ida Orliffe, Fay Silverman, Rachel Baker
Format, screen ratio: Digi Beta PAL, 16:9, Color
Running time: 112 minutes
Language: English
