FEATURE

94 Years And 1 Nursing Home Later:
A Follow-Up

by Anka Theroux

"94 YEARS AND 1 NURSING HOME LATER", a courageous, personal documentary by Boston filmmaker Laurel Greenberg, has had far-reaching impact on the film festival circuit. The forty-five minute film won Best Documentary at Chicago's Silver Images Film Festival and was honored at The New England Film and Video Festival. In October, "94 YEARS" swept the Renaissance City Film Festival Providence awards, receiving Best Documentary and Best In Festival honors.

In 45 minutes that speed by, Greenberg uses a combination of videotapes made by her father about her grandmother, Greenberg's interviews with other family members, and her own voice-over to explore how her father coped with his mother's decline. The film is unique because her focus is not merely on the physical deterioration associated with aging but also on the emotional distance between loved ones which often results from our inability to cope with a loved one's decline. Greenberg avoids easy answers and gives her audience a layered, nuanced film filled with all the rich complexity of human relationships.

"94 YEARS AND 1 NURSING HOME LATER" documents Laurel's grandmother, Belle, as she faces a dramatic life change: moving from a vital, highly independent lifestyle to an almost entirely dependent position as she grapples with illness and isolation. In examining Belle's life, Laurel stresses how "taking care of family" had always been the role that most characterized her grandmother's life. Accounts from relatives and friends attest to her immense dedication as a caretaker. Receiving help, and particularly asking for it, proved to be extremely difficult for her. This contributed in part to the tragic communication gap which ensued between Belle and her son, Marvin.

Marvin Greenberg began taping his visits to his mother with his new video camera after she entered the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, her "final caretaker." Laurel says she made this film because "I was disturbed and motivated by the home movies that my father shot of his visits with my grandmother, but I felt there was a story to be told about how communication between them had broken down." Laurel was troubled by what she noticed about the interactions between her grandmother and her father. For example, during one visit Marvin asks Belle, "You like this place, Mom?" Belle answers, "It's really nice, very comfortable. You can have all the chairs you want." It was obvious from her moods and body language that she was in emotional crisis, probably profoundly depressed, but was trying to protect her son from her feelings. In the film, as she watches one of these tapes, we hear Laurel ask aloud how her father, a psychiatrist by training, was seemingly unable to see through his mother's evasiveness. Laurel asks, "If she had been a patient of his, would he have detected her crisis sooner?"

During another interaction, Belle refers to her son's next visit (probably in six months) by saying "Maybe I'll die in the meantime." Marvin responds, "How have things been here?" which makes one wonder whether he heard her previous statement. Sometime later, we see Laurel visiting Belle with her father. Laurel sits close to Belle, holding her hand, and says, "You feel isolated here." Following this acknowledgement of her true feelings, Belle seems relieved and comfortable enough to say, " I think I'd feel better closer to you," a single sentence that had taken her years to say.

Never crossing the line into over-sentimentality, self-indulgence, or exploitation and never taking a predictable turn, Laurel's film explores two questions. "What was it about their relationship that kept my grandmother from telling my father she needed him?" And, "Why did my father need my grandmother to verbalize that which seemed so obvious from her moods and body language?"

Laurel neither vilifies nor judges her father's behavior but rather objectively and sensitively examines their interaction and its consequences. She ends the film with conscience-provoking questions:

"How do we weigh our needs against the needs of others?" and "How do we fulfill our family obligations in a modern society?" Finally, she asks her father what he and her mother plan for their aging years, and he replies with a chuckle tinged with sadness and 20-20 hindsight, "Maybe we'll move in with you."

Laurel was director, camera operator, and editor of the film, and Lucia Small, President of Women in Film and Video/New England, was associate producer.

Anka Theroux is a filmmaker and writer who attended film school in New York and has worked on several film festivals in New York and Istanbul. Most recently, she was Executive Director in October of Providence's Renaissance City Film Festival.