Familiar Touch

Familiar Touch reimagines the coming of age genre to illuminate the experience of one older woman as she transitions into assisted living. It experiments with the markers of the genre to consider how we are all, always, coming of age. Narratives of older adults are peripheral in our culture, as if desire, dreams, and agency decay long before our bodies and minds do. As feminist scholar Lynne Segal writes, “as we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age.” Our film resides in that vertigo, as our protagonist Ruth not only disavows the roles expected of her – Mother, Patient, Old Lady – but her “appropriate” age identity, sliding between feeling 85 and 25. As an anti-ageist character study, FAMILIAR TOUCH locates its perspective not with family members who look upon Ruth, but with Ruth looking at herself. This is what differentiates our film from the flurry of recent dementia dramas: it refuses to situate its drama within the trope of the decline narrative. Filmmaker: Sarah Friedland