
Duty of Care: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch

Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch follows Ruth, an octogenarian woman experiencing memory loss as she transitions into assisted living. Played with luminous restraint by Kathleen Chalfant, Ruth is not someone we observe from a distance—we move with her. Told entirely from her perspective, the film unfolds through a sensory experience of time and memory. Through light, texture, sound and gesture, we come to understand what it means to live inside a body—and a mind—that is transforming.
Ruth is looked after by Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a personal support worker, and Brian (Andy McQueen), the home’s doctor. Over time, she begins to interpret Brian’s gentleness and curiosity during her checkups as a kind of mutual affection. At a Valentine’s Day speed-dating event, Ruth is unsettled by its garishness—and by Brian’s absence. When she later glimpses him in what appears to be a warm, private exchange with Vanessa, the moment leaves her shaken. This small heartbreak prompts her to flee Bella Vista in a quiet act of protest and longing.
Friedland’s previous short films—including Drills, Home Exercises and Trust Exercises—explore bodies in motion within institutional and domestic spaces. Her background in choreography and nonfiction filmmaking, as well as her professional experience as a caretaker for the elderly, informs the language of Familiar Touch, where the smallest shifts in posture or sound carry immense emotional weight.
What strikes me most about the film is its sense of space—not only within the frame, but in thought and feeling. The film runs a precise 90 minutes yet unfolds with a gentle expansiveness. Time loops and folds. Audiences are given the chance to reflect, absorb and settle into a world observed with an unrushed gaze free of judgment.
The camera reflects this intention. Friedland and cinematographer Gabe Elder kept the lens at Ruth’s eye level, echoing the posture of a care worker kneeling to meet a patient. That height also recalls Ozu, who often framed characters from the seated perspective of someone on a tatami mat—a quiet form of reverence.
All of this is wrapped in extraordinary sensory detail. Friedland’s collaboration with sound designer Eli Cohn transforms institutional ambient sounds—like HVAC hums and flickering lights—into something symphonic. Just as Ruth turns everyday gestures into dance, she reveals the beauty of the banal. To call it charming would be reductive. This is a film that breathes—and leaves something radical and lasting in its wake.
Familiar Touch enters theatrical release on June 20 from Music Box Films.
Filmmaker: The first thing that I wanted to talk to you about are your grandmothers. I know they had a profound influence on your life and the making of this film. In the act of featuring a protagonist like Ruth, it was urgent for you to honor the kinds of feminisms that you grew up with. I read that one of your grandmothers [paternal] was a poetry editor. In later life she had dementia, and that intimate experience within your family became an important seed for Familiar Touch. So, I wanted to know: What parts of your grandmothers live inside Ruth?
Friedland: One of the things that’s always struck me is the space between the idea of a “granny” and the actual older women that I know, both my grandmothers and the older women that I was a caregiver for. I find the image of the cute little old lady, the sweet grandma trope that we have not just in film, but more broadly in our culture, really infantilizing. That space—between the image of an old woman and the old women that I had these relationships with—was an early kernel for me. Also, my paternal grandmother was the first adult who really saw me as an artist, so we had a mutual understanding that was really impactful.
Filmmaker: It was interesting for me to learn that your grandmother was a poetry editor because you’re so clear and articulate.
Friedland: I come from a family—a lot of academics, scholars and writers—that’s very much obsessed with language, and in some ways I felt that I found myself as an artist in finding a language in movement and image rather than words. When my [paternal] grandmother developed dementia, she became nonverbal, and my family grieved her as if she were no longer there, yet she was so physically expressive. That contrast between her embodied self and her cognitive linguistic self was an early spark for the film.
Filmmaker: In watching your film, I also thought about a different kind of grandmother. Yvonne Rainer is an important inspiration for you. I was reading about her dance piece, Trio A, and was struck by the connection that it shares with Familiar Touch. In the description of Trio A, I learned that Rainer incorporated everyday movements into the piece so that they would become gestures. There’s no hierarchy between action: Everything is given equal weight; the movement runs at the dancer’s own pace; the energy throughout is constant from start to finish; and it’s full of precision but never showy. Much like Yvonne Rainer speaking about energy equality, in your film there’s age equality. You explore the idea of presence, energy and sensuality and how they don’t diminish with age. They just transform.
Friedland: Yvonne Rainer’s work has been a major inspiration for me for years. Discovering her dance films when I was a student, and the idea of the choreographer as a filmmaker, was revelatory for me. I should say I don’t know her personally, just her work. I came to know Kathy [Chalfant] as a performer because of her collaborations with Yvonne Rainer. When we were casting the film, I had just seen the restoration of MURDER and murder and her new dance piece Hellzapoppin’: What about the bees? Her work with everyday movement, and this impulse to not privilege stylized or virtuosic movement, was a strong influence on me in starting to make dance films.
My dance films leading up to Familiar Touch are all centered on everyday movement and what I would describe as social choreographies. Coming into Familiar Touch, the question was, how do I take this language that I’ve created in my other films and bring it into a more narrative space? The film had to get still enough, and slow enough, for those gestures to almost appear as choreography. That was something I worked on a lot with our DP Gabe [Elder]—crafting a shot list that was mostly static. Yvonne’s work around micro-gestures—her Hand Movie—had a huge impact on me as a student. The constraint of a still frame allows the smallest, smallest shift in a hand to have the same feeling of scale and capacity as a full body. That principle definitely continues to resonate with me.
Filmmaker: In an interview, you said Ruth wasn’t just going to be 80 years old, but she was going to be all of the Ruths she had been. In the first shot of the film, we see Ruth rifling through her closet, and it’s not just clothing. It feels like she’s witnessing her own multiverse.
Friedland: Age identity is something I became aware of when I worked as a caregiver. One of the most striking things in that work was noticing that my clients identified with me as their peer, rather than the idea that they were the elder one and I was the younger one. Sometimes, they saw us as best friends; sometimes, I was their girlfriend, their assistant, but the way they related to me wasn’t fixed by age. And being around a younger person, they could almost access the part of themselves that felt the same age as me. That was when I first started thinking about this as a coming-of-old-age film—how Ruth is reckoning with this shift in how the world perceives her.
At the time, I also read a book by Lynne Segal called Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. She writes about this idea of temporal vertigo, that we are all ages and no ages at the same time. There’s this vertigo of going between these ages—you can access your child self, your 20-year-old self, your middle-aged self. I wanted to figure out what sensory experiences or relational experiences would bring out a different version of Ruth in different scenes. Oftentimes, it’s sense perception that brings out a different Ruth: the feeling of waking up and noticing in the light that it’s morning, or the sense perception of water when Ruth is floating in the pool and the water brings out her child self of being at Coney Island. One of the first things that we talked about in terms of [Kathy’s] character was that she was going to be this phrase from Lynne Segal: all ages and no age. Sometimes, we would be directive about it together and say, “This is Ruth’s age identity here.” Other times, she would slip in and out more fluidly without us assigning it in advance. Playing with that together was one of the most exciting parts of this creative process.
Filmmaker: You really see that she had a lot of space to play in the different scenes. There are different character traits and ages that come out in different moments. The film is really “with Ruth”—not above her or from the side, but really with her at eye level the entire time. I think that creates an experience that isn’t just empathetic, but we see the world through her eyes.
Your film isn’t about “people”; it’s specifically about people as a community. You scheduled the shoot time around the rhythms of the home [Villa Gardens]. You would make sure that your shooting happened at times when the hallways were clear. I feel like your empathetic approach is radical, like a political gesture. I wanted to talk about how this approach shaped the shoot and why it was important to you to design the production this way.
Friedland: After working as a caregiver, I started teaching filmmaking to older adults. Filmmaking is largely neglected as a subject of lifelong learning. I started making films with older adults before Familiar Touch and found that there was so much capacity for filmmaking in the older adults I worked with. It just felt like, “If we’re going to make an anti-ageist character study, let’s put talented older adults to work in making it.” From early on in writing, it felt clear to me that this film needed to be made in this way that integrated a creative aging workshop with an intergenerational artist residency and feature film production.
Most films are greenlit by financiers; our film was greenlit by the residents and care workers in this community. Villa Gardens has a long history of being a home for former educators and social workers. One of the wonderful things its executive director, Shaun Rushforth, did was [make] it incredibly clear to me how we were going to build consensus and consent within this community and would only proceed if that existed. I pitched the film first to the residents’ council, then to the general staff meeting. The film was very much greenlit within those two meetings; the residents and the staff signed on to do this. The workshop we did was five weeks long, and we met twice a week. The first session of each week was led by one of our department heads or a member of our cast teaching their domain of filmmaking—Gabe Elder did the cinematography workshop; [actor] Carolyn Michelle did the acting workshop. The second session of each week was a shoot where the residents would rotate crew roles and create a short film each week. What that meant was that by the end of those five weeks not only did the residents know our crew, but they knew where their talents and strengths lay. There are many residents who act in the film or are in the background, but just as many were working behind the scenes. This meant that there was this wonderful reciprocal exchange. Watching younger people come into this with the idea that it was going to be depressing, that to be in a care setting was to wait to die—watching those perceptions shift and watching them develop close relationships with these older adults was amazing.
During those five weeks, we got to meet with every department of this retirement community to understand the rhythms of their labor and how to create a schedule that fit in with that labor. I got to find out who had cinematic ambitions and discovered that there were so many staff who loved movies, then we cast them in the film. We talk about consent in filmmaking in a way that can be somewhat cold—talking about what we shouldn’t do as opposed to creating consent in a filmmaking process that comes from a place of mutual interest. So much of what we got to do in those two months leading up to filmmaking was to find the place where there was mutual interest in doing this, and there was this sense of reciprocity. The video village was literally a village because we had residents and care workers observing what we were doing. We were able to constantly adjust the details of tone and care work, how a meal is served, etc. I think this made the film all the more truthful.
Filmmaker: I could tell that there was a mutual curiosity, an exchange between yourself and the residents. I was touched to read that you sent a survey asking them what kind of sounds they remembered when they first moved in. There are these fantastic, detailed soundscapes in the film—people breathing, bodies shifting, fabrics rustling, an HVAC system. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your collaboration with Eli Cohn and also your sound recordist, James Salini, and how you all worked together to build this deeply detailed environment of sound.
Friedland: One of the things going into the edit that was really clear to me was that we needed to understand Ruth’s perspective not just in an ocular way. We talk about POV as though it’s something based in vision, but I wanted to get a sense of Ruth’s perspective through all of her senses. In older adults in general, the spatial components of how people hear sound shifts. Distance often collapses; further sounds can feel quite close. All of those ambient sounds that you often take out in the mix were instead amplified and orchestrated. James was capturing very close details of Kathy’s body and clothing and how she touches all of the things around her. Then, in the mix, Eli was building very complex layers of sound that spoke to that spatial dimension but also reflected what we had learned from the residents of what signified to them this transition from personal to institutional space. Some of the residents in the survey remarked on hearing sounds that indicated labor, whether that was shift changes or walkie talkie beeps or just hearing footsteps outside your door.
One of my favorite parts of working with Eli is that he’s also a composer and a cellist. He was able to find certain musical tones within this diegetic institutional soundscape of air conditioning and lights buzzing. Even though the film has no score, he created a feeling of score in certain scenes by pitching some of these diegetic sounds up and down.
Another way that ageism appears in our film industry is that the canned walls of background noise that you can access in sound libraries that you usually throw in the background of the film’s mix—it’s all younger voices. It’s so, so hard to find background voices that are older voices. So, we did three recording sessions with groups of older adults talking and gossiping and breathing and humming. The older voices in the background were captured during field recordings I did with community members. But to come back to the concept of age identity: Ruth doesn’t perceive herself as older. I wanted to really feel that sonically. That barrage of older voices feels at odds with how she perceives herself.
Filmmaker: In talking about Ruth and how she perceives herself, I’m curious to talk about the gentle attention that you give to Ruth’s senses, her touch and her taste and her curiosity, but also her sexuality. During the Valentine’s Day speed-dating scene when [Ruth] runs out of the hall, we’re not laughing at her. Because we’re right there with her, we understand how the misunderstanding [with Brian] happened. You really feel the heartbreak alongside her. I was wondering how you shaped Ruth’s desires and why it was important to represent sexuality at an older age with such nuance and honesty.
Friedland: This goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, how ageism and sexism intersect. It pisses me off deeply, the way in which older women are de-sexualized. We all want to perceive ourselves as sensual and sexy in perpetuity; we all have sexuality from birth until death. So, I find the denial of sexuality to older women in how they’re perceived and spoken about really pernicious. It’s also just untrue from my own encounters with older women. Something that happens a lot with older adults with memory loss is increasing disinhibition. With disinhibition, certain sexual impulses that one might not otherwise express or act upon are acted upon. It is so common that people with memory loss flirt with their adult children, not knowing they’re their adult children, or come on to their caregivers.
I knew from the beginning that I really wanted to not only honor Ruth’s sexuality as an older woman but show these expressions of sexuality for people with memory loss that we have a hard time addressing, even if those moments of sexual expression are directed toward someone that is inappropriate, [and] to do so without shaming the sexual impulse itself. That was how I talked to Kathy [Chalfant] and [H.] Jon [Benjamin] about that opening scene—how do we show Ruth’s desire without shaming it, but at the same time be sensitive to how her son would feel at his mother’s coming on to him? If we were going to get to know Ruth through her embodiment—how she experiences the world via her senses—then her sexuality would also be expressed through that same sensory language of touch and gesture. There’s a sense of longing in how she wants to touch certain textures, or in her craving for other embodied experiences—like when she’s in the pool, for example. We called them “echoes” within our shot list. Certain moments of physical contact, whether between Ruth and another person, or Ruth and material, or Ruth and herself, would share similar framings.
Filmmaker: You talk in some interviews about framing from the distance or perspective of a care worker. It’s never too intimate or invasive; it’s close, but it’s not crossing that line. Did you choose certain kinds of lenses so you could land at a particular distance?
Friedland: The first choices we made were about distance and movement. We were thinking about the camera being at the position of the caregiver—close enough to perceive subtle shifts in someone’s behavior but distant enough to allow autonomy. The first choice was that, for the most part, our de facto position was going to be at the distance of the caregiver and at the eye level of Ruth. Postural differences can be very threatening to people with memory loss. One of the first things you learn as a memory caregiver is to kneel down, to be at eye level.
The second [choice] was that we wanted the camera to be as still as possible so that the smallest shifts in Ruth’s body would really register. We were very lucky to work with Panavision. They gave us their new filmmaker grant that allowed us to have access to their equipment. We fell in love with the Panavision Primo lenses. Particularly in looking at skin, the Primos had this quality where there was a supple, creamy softness to skin without losing the fidelity and texture of a digital image. There also needed to be a realism to the image. The Primos have this buttery quality to the fall-off and focus that we fell in love with.
We only used optical filters in moments where Ruth enters a more transcendent state—specifically, during moments of touch. So, for example, when her hand flips over in the car, as an invitation to Steve. This was another of those “echoes”—we re-used the same lens later on when Ruth’s hand flips open in the exam room. There were paired moments between gestures and what lenses we were choosing.
Because we were working in this real facility, we couldn’t do any tracking shots because placing tracks would be really dangerous for older adults. So, we knew we had to mainly be on sticks. Working in tiny bedrooms and exam rooms, oftentimes the lens we were using was based on the actual constraints of the room.
Filmmaker: In thinking of adjacent works related to yours, I thought of Jeanne Dielman, Aquarius, 45 Years, Another Year and Gloria. Are there any specific films or visual references that you and Gabe drew from when you were building the look and language of the film?
Friedland: We both looked at still photography and films. We looked a lot at the images of Roy DeCarava in terms of how he captures small gestures. With our production designer, Stephanie Osin Cohen—who I’ve worked with just as long as Gabe—we looked at the images of Harry Gruyaert, particularly how he captures color within institutional space. An early choice for us was that while we wanted to avoid over-romanticizing the care facility, we also wanted to stay away from the clinical feel that most care facilities have on film. Stephanie and I referred to the color world of the retirement community as “cruise ship Marriott” aesthetics.
There are a lot of what I would describe as “coming-of-old-age” films outside of America that were big influences for me, like Umberto D. and Poetry—less so visually, more so in terms of building a character study that’s interested in the subjectivity of an older person. Visually, a film that had a big impact on me was The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel. On paper, it has little in common with our film, but we looked at it together as a team. It’s a film where you get insight into how the characters around the protagonist perceive her without undermining the centrality of her experience. That was a big question going into Familiar Touch—how do we get to know Ruth’s caregivers without bursting the bubble of Ruth’s self-perception? We went shot by shot through some of The Headless Woman to learn from Lucrecia. It was a big risk for our film—one misstep and it would be easy to invalidate Ruth’s experience. That film gave me a lot of clues.
Filmmaker: I read that every cookbook and dish was chosen in collaboration with [Moosewood Cookbook author] Mollie Katzen. I was curious about how you worked with Stephanie Cohen to build Ruth’s character and world through all of these objects and textures.
Friedland: The starting point comes back to the question of ageism. One way personhood is assigned to older characters is through flashbacks—by showing them young to prove they mattered. It was very clear to me from the script stage that we needed to understand Ruth’s past not through flashbacks, but through material details in the present. Stephanie is an extraordinary artist. She and Mollie had a fruitful collaboration in figuring out how each of these objects in Ruth’s home could tell us something about who she was. Steph created fictional cookbooks that Ruth authored, researching the typography and graphic design used in cookbooks in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and emulating that design. Mollie was incredibly generous in letting us use her original notebooks for the Moosewood Cookbook, treating them as Ruth’s own. There was this beautiful integration of Mollie’s real archive with the fictional archive Steph created for Ruth. We were trying to chart this whole history for Ruth: imagining her as a feminist cook coming of age in a countercultural moment as a young mother navigating a male-dominated field. The two of us spent a lot of time crafting this biography for Ruth in conversation with Mollie, which then got expressed in these objects that Stephanie made.
Filmmaker: Was Mollie someone that you always knew about? Did you grow up cooking her recipes?
Friedland: The Moosewood Cookbook, [along with] her other books, were staples in my house growing up. The Russian borscht recipe that Ruth recites to prove her mental faculties to Brian is Mollie’s recipe. My mom had written it out on a note card. I thought that it was a family recipe brought over from the old country, then discovered it had been written in upstate New York in the ’70s by Mollie Katzen. It’s one of my oldest taste memories.
Mollie is emblematic of a number of threads that [are shared by] Ruth. One was being a Jewish feminist artist who comes of age in a kind of countercultural moment in America. Wanting to place Ruth in that 1970s turn toward incorporating vegetables into American cooking, of which Mollie was an innovator and leader, felt both political and personal. Ruth’s childhood took place in Brooklyn, in a time shaped by left-wing politics and the generational assimilation of Jewish immigrants. I was trying to place Ruth between that history of immigration and the feminist counterculture that gave rise to the first famous female cooks in America—women who understood food as a site of creativity, care and quiet resistance. Mollie and I hit it off and discovered all of these shared threads of interest. Ruth wasn’t based on her, but she was so generous and lent us details we could bring into Ruth’s orbit.
Filmmaker: There are a couple of moments talking about access and privilege—like the staff member buffing the floor, talking on the phone about hoping to see his family one day, and later, when Ruth overhears Vanessa and Brian talking about how they could never afford a place like this for their parents. I wanted to ask how you decided to weave these questions of class into the film’s fabric.
Friedland: The choice for Ruth to live in what I’d describe as a high-end retirement community—one that would be prohibitively expensive for a majority of Americans—comes from two places. One was production ethics. We were working with a micro budget, so we needed a facility that already had the resources to care for their residents and staff. The second was imagining Ruth coming from a working-class background and experiencing professional success that altered her class identity. Because of her memory loss and slipping into a younger age identity, she might still perceive herself as working class, yet obviously now has access to wealth and privilege. That disconnect could make her feel out of step with her wealthy peers and more drawn to the staff, with whom she feels a shared class identity. I was interested in portraying the friction in Ruth’s class identity, in addition to age.
Filmmaker: It’s your first time directing professional actors, and I read you were nervous. But watching the film, it felt effortless. How did your background in dance and choreography shape your approach to directing?
Friedland: I wasn’t nervous—I was terrified. Nothing scared me more than directing professional actors with dialogue. I felt comfortable directing movement but hadn’t directed dialogue before. To work through the fear, I started meeting monthly with my friend, actor Hayward Leach. We’d choose dialogue-heavy scenes from other films, and I’d direct him and his colleagues. Instead of me giving them notes afterward, they gave me feedback on my direction—what worked and what didn’t. That rehearsal was so helpful.
With Kathy, we realized that talking about Ruth’s body was the key. We’d speak about her gestures, postures and the tasks she performed. That became our shared language. So, in the end, I don’t know that I directed this any differently than I did my dance films because Kathy and I had that shared language around her body. To give one example, there’s a shot that we cut where Ruth discards a toothbrush when she first enters the retirement community. We drove our AD crazy because we ended up having one of the only disagreements we had on set, this 30-minute debate over exactly how Ruth would discard this toothbrush and what that would say about how she was perceiving herself in this new environment and what it meant about herself. That was on day two, and it set the tone for how we spoke about Ruth. This is just to say that, yeah, I came in with this fear of language and was practicing how to work with language, and then at the end of the day it all came back to movement.