Familiar Touch

Community Partner: Creative Aging in Nyack

After the film there will be a discussion with Dr. Marc Rothman, CEO and co-founder of Lizzy Care, whose mission is to make dementia care easier, more human, and truly supportive for families, caregivers, and the people they love.

 “The mystery of Ruth’s mindfulness — which ebbs and flows — is at the core of Chalfant’s brilliant, award-worthy performance. Hers is a virtuosity that doesn’t ask for pity or applause or even link arms with the stricken-but-defiant disease-playing headliners who have gone before her. Chalfant’s Ruth is merely, momentously human: an older woman in need, but no less expressive of life’s fullness because of it. It’s a portrayal to remember, for as long as any of us can.” – Los Angeles Times

 “At the center of everything, is the overwhelming tenderness and humanity of Kathleen Chalfant, who unlocks the mysterious keys of Alzheimer’s for us all to understand, with no histrionics and no bursts of emotional self-indulgence. – Observer

“Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art. It stars Kathleen Chalfant, who has spent much of her career in New York theater, as Ruth, a woman with dementia, and she delivers the sort of performance that feels at once utterly authentic and like the product of long experience, on stages of all kinds and sizes. It is, in a word, a masterclass.” – Wall Street Journal

“Friedland, who also wrote the film’s script, is not given over to histrionics or blaring displays of emotion, instead asking us to follow Ruth and experience the world through her eyes. The impact is profound.” – IndieWire

“There’s a profound tenderness in Sarah Friedland’s affecting first feature and a rare empathy.” – Screen International

“An exquisitely fragmentary portrait of memory loss…illuminates its protagonist’s condition with uncommon concision and grace, and with few of the formal and narrative strategies we’ve come to expect… Chalfant’s performance, for all its exquisite subtlety, is also furiously alive…This is a rare leading role for Chalfant, a veteran actor best known for her theater work, and it instills, among other things, a powerful desire to see her in more.” –  The New Yorker

“The delicacy of what [Chalfant] does in this role is astounding.”  – New York Magazine

“Wondrous. [An] exquisite drama. Explores the human mind in all its frailness and glory.” – Sight and Sound

“Our society treats aging like a curse never to be mentioned instead of the inevitability it is, but Friedland’s film challenges us to see it head-on.” – Washington Post