WINNER!
Luigi de Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film
Horizons Awards for Best Director & Actress
Venice Film Festival 2024
Ruth (acclaimed stage actress Kathleen Chalfant) is an elegant, meticulous woman in her 80s. Her home in southern California is sunny and well-appointed, with greenery and tasteful mementos from a life filled with family, adventures, and pleasures. Ruth is going on a journey: Her body is moving to full-time memory care facility; her mind and spirit into the unknown. In her debut feature, filmmaker Sarah Friedland invites the viewer into this journey gently, allowing us to experience both the disorienting shadows and bright micro-moments along with Ruth, as she loses pieces of her past self, while still living — engaging with the present-time flesh and blood, and kindness, of her caregivers.
“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.”�– Justin Chang, The New Yorker
“A gorgeous drama…A breathtaking feature debut from Friedland, who comes right out of the gate with an assured narrative voice… Chalfant is a revelation as Ruth, taking the audience by the hand and guiding us through the many faces of this woman. It’s as if every moment of her life is a new scene, a different world she must adjust to.”�– Jourdain Searles, RogerEbert.com
“A deeply kinetic work. Friedland, who is also a choreographer, infuses the film with graceful bodily gestures and overtures to the senses. In its bounty of movement and sensorial pleasures, it finds its compassionate voice—even though the memories of the life Ruth lived before she entered the care facility are slipping away, her body is still expressive, still free to actively experience being alive. It’s rare for a work of art about cognitive decline to focus on what is rather than what’s lost.”�– Sarah Fensom, Reverse Shot
“The delicacy of what [Chalfant] does in this role is astounding.” �– Alison Willmore, New York Magazine
“WONDROUS. [An] exquisite drama. Explores the human mind in all its frailness and glory.”�– Ela Bittencourt, Sight and Sound
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