THE ALZHEIMER'S DOCUMENTARY
In Danville, California, Lee Gorewitz wanders on a soul-searching odyssey through her Alzheimer’s & Dementia care unit. Confined by the limits of her physical boundaries, she scavenges for reminders of her life in the outside world. Yet her search is for more than a word, or a memory, or a familiar face. It is a quest for understanding.
A total immersion into the fragmented day-to-day experience of mental illness, You're Looking at Me Like I Live Here and I Don't is the first Alzheimer's documentary filmed exclusively in an Alzheimer’s & Dementia care unit, and the first told from the perspective of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The film reveals Lee's penetrating ruminations and charismatic vitality, challenging our preconceptions of illness and aging. Here is the journey of a woman who will not let us forget her – even as she struggles to remember her self.
THE SOUNDTRACK
Download the Theme Song! (.mp3)
"Lee’s Anthem" (Music by Nadia Shihab)
In an effort to express the inner pulse of Alzheimer’s, the violin-based score was developed with a minimalist and melodic aesthetic, incorporating repetition, delay and looping techniques to evolve meditative rhythmic phrases into densely-layered improvisations. Immersed in Alzheimer's confounding logic and memory loss cycles, each composition adheres to the discordant, but never fully crippling rhythms of the disease. Subtlely woven into the fabric of her day-to-day experience, the music has a solitary wildness that mirrors Lee's own odyssey within the walls of her Alzheimer's Unit.
Read the PBS interview with Composer Nadia Shihab here.
Download “Persian Rug Improvisation No.1,”
a new composition from Nadia Shihab (.mp3)
