Depicting aging and diminishing mental acuity, with increasing candor about same, essentially has become its own subgenre—the drama of descent or disappearance. Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch feels like something different, eschewing the conventions of linear decline to stay rooted in the present-tense bodily experience of its protagonist: Ruth Goldman, played by a galvanizing Kathleen Chalfant. Beyond the subjective design of the filmmaking—comprising not just what we hear, but how we understand the premise of any given scene—this is a catalyzing collaboration between Chalfant, storied veteran of both stage (Wit) and screen, and Friedland, a student of choreography who sought out a movement-based approach to the subject matter. 

Chalfant’s Ruth is a sharp, witty, appealingly regal writer of cookbooks; the actor has spoken of her best friend, playwright Sybille Pearson, as having dementia, lending a special bond with the character. Friedland drew inspiration from her paternal grandmother, a poetry editor who turned nonverbal in her dementia while remaining physically expressive. Familiar Touch was partly filmed at Villa Gardens retirement community in Pasadena, California, where Friedland held a multiweek film workshop with residents that involved many in the production. 

For her debut feature, Friedland continued with her established team from her “Movement Exercises” trilogy including cinematographer Gabe C. Elder (shooting on the ARRI Amira with Panavision Primo Lenses) and production designer Stephanie Osin Cohen. Besides Chalfant, the cast includes an excellent H. Jon Benjamin as Ruth’s dutiful but quietly shattered son, and Carolyn Michelle and Andy McQueen as patient careworkers at the home. 

I spoke with Friedland in Venice a few days before Familiar Touch won won three prizes at the festival’s 81st edition—one for best debut feature, another for Chalfant as best actress in the Orizzonti section (which the performer accepted in Italian), and a third for Friedland as best director.

Filmmaker: When did you realize you had a way to portray this experience?

Friedland: I started writing it about 10 years ago as a college student. The first draft read more like a movement score. It’s written in screenplay format but read almost as just a description of her movement, [starting in] in her home of many decades—imagining her moving around that space for the last time, her patterns of movement in her new home, the assisted living facility, and looking at that shift in rhythm and routine and physicality. Then I put it aside for a long time, graduated, started working in production for other filmmakers and began working as a caregiver part-time to older adults, specifically artists and creatives with memory loss. I answered this ad for a sculptor with dementia, who needed someone to be an artist’s assistant and caregiver.  

I learned so much about our identity as humans in general. As their twenty-something caregiver, many of them didn’t see me as younger than them. They treated me as a peer, sometimes a friend, others as a girlfriend or assistant. It struck me how much more malleable age identity is—not just for older adults and memory loss, but for all of us that can access these different versions of ourselves that accumulate in the present moment. That was a big turning point in writing for me: realizing that Ruth was not going to just be 80 but was going to be all of the Ruths that she had been at these different ages. I wanted to let that permeate her character not through flashbacks or ruptures in time, but through the performance. 

Around the same time I was also really noticing how many of the older women in my life continued to be sexual and sensual beings. So many of the films that looked at aging, in my view, were deeply infantilizing and problematic, depicting older adults as lacking sexuality or their sexuality being a joke. So, I think it was the convergence of all of these realizations over a period of 13 years.

Filmmaker: Chalfant has such a vivid presence on screen, just bristling with a natural spontaneity. What went into collaborating on portraying Ruth?

Friedland: Working with her has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. I mean, this is my first time directing a professional cast. She’s so present and curious and detailed and collaborative. I was quite nervous not having worked with dialogue so extensively before, and then having written a script that doesn’t have that much dialogue compared to your average film but is also much more narrative than the movement-based films I made in the past . I discovered that—in part, I think, because Kathy has a long history working with choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Pam Tanowitz—we were able to really speak about Ruth in her body. That’s perhaps part of the sense of presence. We were thinking about Ruth as being all ages and no ages at the same time, but it’s not something I prescribed beforehand, so Kathy would really surprise me. There were clues in the script of when a more impish child Ruth would come up and when [she’s] a professional young woman, but it was left very open-ended. She would play and experiment on set.

Filmmaker: You evidently clicked with each other, but how did you know she would be so right? 

Friedland: I was looking for our Ruth for many years. Kathy and I had this wonderful conversation where we found ourselves not even really talking about the film or the script, just about all of these shared connections. Both of us spent very formative years in Italy. We found a shared political affinity—she’s a huge lefty like me. We ended up talking about dance, and I had seen some of her collaborations with Yvonne Rainer shortly before we cast her. When we first started casting, she had been too young, then we reconnected. Her intelligence is so multidimensional in terms of her politics, feeling and physicality. There’s no way when you meet her that you could imagine her fitting into a little old lady stereotype. She’s such a dynamic person. 

Filmmaker: How did you develop an audiovisual language to help express her character’s experience? A lot of films do it in terms of a dramatic decline.

Friedland: The idea that grounded the visual language for us was wanting to capture Ruth’s sense-making not just in the sensory experience she’s having, but literally how she makes sense of the world and herself through her body. One of the ways in which the type of film you were describing, without naming names, is that the narrative of decline largely comes through thinking of a person solely through their cognitive self. When cognitive faculties change or decline, therefore the person is no longer themselves, and I think part of my choreographic background is that I’m really interested in characters and the sense of self that comes through embodiment and through other senses. Something a lot of people don’t know about experiences of memory loss is that for many people the other senses are intensified even as their cognitive faculties decline—touch, taste, smell, experiences of body language and posture are all heightened. So, we wanted to create Ruth’s perspective, not through her ocular perspective—there are only two literal POV shots in the film—but through her embodied perspective, and to craft a visual language to capture Ruth through her touch, gestures, sonic experiences. That meant a lot of static shots that allow us to really tune in to the little details of her body. These static scenes allow non-dancerly movements to be more vivid and more clear in their movement pattern. 

We were also thinking a lot about how the camera could occupy a space that’s almost closer to a careworker’s intimate proximity. One of the first things you learn when you train to be a memory caregiver is that differences in body language and experiences of other people’s physicality can be very intense and overwhelming for people with memory loss. If someone is seated and someone is standing above you, that can feel very threatening if you don’t have the social cues to understand why they’re standing next to you, to give one example. Most of the time the camera is at eye level with Ruth, and everybody else comes in and out of frame, so it’s tethered to her embodiment in this moment of transition.

Filmmaker: What’s an example of where the static camera is helping catch her movement with particular clarity?

Friedland: A lot of small gestures repeat or have an echo later in the film. When her hand slips open as if to invite it to be held in the car with Steve on their drive to Villa Vista, then again when she’s in the moment of fantasy in the exam room later on—that gesture’s so small, a flip of a wrist. Those little moments really needed a static frame for their choreography to be legible. There’s a logistical component, too, which is that because we were shooting in a real community, the gear that you need to do complicated movements wasn’t safe to place in the hallways. So, we really had to shoot almost everything on a tripod that could be easily moved away.  

Filmmaker: Did shooting at Villa Gardens affect the production sequence? 

Friedland: We shot very much out of sequence, because we created this schedule to match the rhythms of Villa Gardens. When are the dining hours? When does this group meet in this space? When would us being in the hallways be a hazard to people walking? Other than cast availability, our schedule was really made to fit into life there. We were seeing it as almost like an artist’s residency, that we had been invited as guests into their home and workplace.

One of the unexpected benefits of shooting out of order is that unlike many films about aging memory loss, where there’s a depiction of decline and the drama usually comes from this rapid descent into death or decrepitude, in our case we really wanted to show Ruth’s experience of the present moment, which is constantly variable. It wasn’t going to be a linear narrative of decline. Therefore, Kathy could have freedom in what age she was and how she was relating to the space around her. The film has the scaffolding of the coming-of-age genre, but I didn’t want the structure to be based on loss of memory, but rather the experience of the self in present moment, which isn’t quite so linear. 

Filmmaker: Ruth is used to exerting a certain authority in relation to others. Was that take-charge quality always a key part of the character?

Friedland: Yeah, absolutely. There are a few threads for me there. I was thinking about the trope of the little old lady, and cute grandmas, and how much the older women in my life do not fit in that characterization. I was thinking in particular about the women coming of age now into late life, including some of the artists that I worked for, [who] were part of this wave of feminist women who spent their young adult lives fighting for independence and agency and power. I was trying to imagine what it was like for that generation of women to then experience—because of the ageism in our society and how our care infrastructure is laid out—a loss of autonomy and agency. What must that be like for this generation of women for whom independence was not something taken for granted? What is their experience itself like and who’s caring for them?

One of the things I found as a careworker was that something universal among us is a desire to express our agency and autonomy in different ways. Even as my clients needed care to exist in a social world and get through their day, I was very moved by small ways in which they still expressed their autonomy and independence. For example, for one woman I worked for, picking out her outfit every day was incredibly important. That choice was where she found an agency. For another artist I worked for, making her own grocery list and picking each vegetable herself is very important. There’s echoes of all of these people in Ruth. I wanted to depict the continuity of these adults rather than their decline. And on a personal note, both of my grandmothers are authoritative, bossy, sharp women! I think the way in which we ascribe this cuteness to older women is so sexist and infantilizing. I wanted to see the continuity of Ruth’s power and her self-expression, because that’s what I have known to be true about older women that I am close to.

Filmmaker: How did you conceive of a soundscape that could track with Ruth’s feelings and state moment to moment?

Friedland: The sound design was written into the script: that there wouldn’t be any score and we would hear the world as Ruth does. The first component of that was imagining this transition from the soundscape of her home to the soundscape of her new home. I worked with an amazing sound designer, Eli Kohn, and one of the things that we talked about was this heightened sensitivity many people with memory loss have. But more than that, when people age, sonic scale shifts. People have a harder time differentiating between sounds that are close and far away, and they’re kind of collapsed. So we started thinking about how Ruth is experiencing this space in a way where that scale is a little bit distorted and how that could be expanded more broadly to also be temporal. As other, younger Ruths emerge in the present moment, sounds from those experiences also emerged.

In thinking about what it would be like for Ruth to move from one home to another, and that loss of home, I sent out a survey to the residents we were collaborating with and asked them what sounds they noticed when they first moved there. There were recurring themes in everyone’s responses. One was hearing the sounds of labor. So much labor goes into maintaining a retirement community or assisted living facility—the sounds of maintenance, care workers, kitchen staff, cleaning—and how distinct that was from living alone. Multiple people remarked on the fear of hearing ambulance sounds and what that meant about the experience of some of their peers who that sound was for. 

Other folks remarked on HVAC systems, and the humming and buzzing of lights and air of an institutional space. I wanted there to be these moments of surrealism, because I think experiencing such a malleable sense of time and age produces a surreal experience of the present—not a rupture of reality or the present moment, but to just let the present moment get slippery, if you will, and to do that by heightening Ruth’s sensitivity. Eli basically started creating these tones from air conditioning and humming lights, pulling out lower and higher frequencies from them, almost creating musical elements from institutional sounds, like when the lights are switching on from motion sensors in the hallway at night.

Filmmaker: And for her home that she leaves?

Friedland: We tried to capture this specific Southern California canyon sound. I took a lot of  field recordings in canyons in Pasadena that are used, so that Ruth’s home would have a very specific sound that we hear the loss of. Eli and I wanted to create these symphonies from the space that Ruth is moving in. 

Filmmaker: I’m imagining a screenplay with all sorts of sonic notations.

Friedland: Yeah, that was the case, and then for production, I basically transferred it to another document for myself, because that much level of detail can be a little bit cumbersome for scheduling and timing things. But I wrote sound scripts. I do a lot of scoring for myself outside of a screenplay format, basically writing sequences of sound, of gestures. At one point, I wrote a sequence of every moment of physical contact, every object Ruth touches. I love movement scores, so I like finding other ways of scripting that aren’t in screenplay format that allow me to then write a script that is legible for my crew.

Filmmaker: Ruth’s house is obviously only in a portion of the movie, but it looms in our minds. Was that a house you found, or how much of exterior or interior was built?

Friedland: I went door to door in Pasadena and Altadena looking for a house, because we couldn’t afford the houses that are available to production services companies. I knew that we weren’t going to come to know Ruth’s social milieu and history through flashbacks. Ruth’s past had to be manifest in her house. I come from a line of left-wing secular Jews who lived in California on my dad’s side. There’s a long history of the relationship between modernist architecture and Los Angeles and socialist and utopian politics among Jewish immigrants in California that my paternal grandparents were very connected to. I grew up going to their house, which was a modernist house, kind of collectivistic. So, I wanted her house to allude to her political and social background, and also to show her professional background in her cooking. 

I found this house, but someone was living there, so our production designer, Stephanie Cohen, basically redesigned the entire interior. She worked closely with the cook and cookbook author Mollie Katzen to pick every cookbook, every piece of dishware and pot and pan, to create a kitchen that would express her history among this generation of female chefs who came of age professionally during the counterculture of the 60s, and to let this confluence of her different histories come through in the physical objects of her home, all of her cookbooks and archives. Mollie Katzen lent us her original notebooks from writing The Moosewood Cookbook, so Ruth’s notebooks are Mollie’s notebooks from the ’60s and ’70s.  I feel like her house is just as much a character in the film. 

Filmmaker: Do you have an idea for what you want to film next?

Friedland: I’ve optioned a novel that I’m in the middle of adapting. I can’t say yet what it is, but I’ll just say that it continues my work translating a movement-based way of filming to a story. It’s sort of a continuation of a video installation I made called Crowds in a more narrative form. This one won’t be about aging, but will continue to be looking at political and personal experiences through movement patterns.