FAMILIAR TOUCH reimagines the coming of age genre to illuminate the experience of one older woman as she transitions into assisted living. It experiments with the markers of the 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. As an anti-ageist character study, FAMILIAR TOUCH locates its perspective not with family members who look upon Ruth, but with Ruth looking at herself. This is what differentiates our film from the flurry of recent dementia dramas: it refuses to situate its drama within the trope of the decline narrative.

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. 

Integrating Friedland’s experiences as both a memory caregiver and teaching artist to older adults, FAMILIAR TOUCH was made in collaboration with the residents and staff of Villa Gardens, an active continuing care retirement community in Pasadena, California. By turning a retirement community into a professional film set and intergenerational artist residency, we wanted to challenge the perception of care facilities as depressing places devoid of creativity, and support older adults’ self-expression while inviting their, and care workers’, collaboration in our anti-ageist character study. Our team facilitated a 5-week filmmaking workshop for the residents to make their own films about their daily lives before they joined our feature production as both cast and crew.