Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (dir.Deborah Hoffmann)

I watched this film at Lasse and Andrea's house tonight with Lasse's lovely pasta and my lovely chocolate cake. Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter is a documentary about an elderly mother's deteriorating memory through Alzheimer's disease directed by her daughter and filmed by her daughters girlfriend. The film is a really intimate portrait of the mother trying to comprehend the world around her, grasping at the few details she can understand, which a moment later are gone, and the intellectual and emotional adjustments her daughter goes through during the progress of the disease. There are some very funny and touching moments in the film and it's not in the slightest bit depressing. It shows the honest frustration of the daughter but mainly it's about how to still find joy by adapting to the limitations of this disease and not fighting against it. The care home the mother was put in could, at first glance, seem like a depressing hell as the patients sit around in matching blue tracksuits but it's a home specifically for people with Alzheimer's where they are allowed to exist with their disease and are not sedated to the eyeballs. With no mementoes around her, half-familiar and causing anxiety through not being able to remember why these things are familiar, the mother lives totally in the present. She throws her arms out and says, 'Oh, the joy of me!' I like that the daughter includes herself in the film so it wasn't just a chronicle of her mother's Alzheimer's but an honest, articulate an insightful understanding of her parallel journey with this disease.