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We are thrilled to welcome American filmmaker Sarah Friedland to the UCSF Memory and Aging Center for a screening of her feature film Familiar Touch. Awarded the Luigi de Laurentiis Lion of the Future for best first film and Best Director award at the Venice International Film Festival (2024), this film intimately follows an octagenarian woman's transition into assisted living and the shifts in identity, memory, and physicality that follow. The narrative in anchored in moments of empathy and frustration, loss and gain, and with a sensitivty to the body and the senses.
Immediately following the film screening, we will host a panel conversation featuring Sarah Friedland alongside filmmakers Michelle Memran (The Rest I Make Up) and Cynthia Stone (Keys, Bags, Names, Words), and Stacy Kono (Director of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employer's Network) for a conversation about the aesthetics of aging, caregiving, and neurodegenerative disease in contemporary film.
Watch the trailer for Familiar Touch here.
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Friedland’s debut feature film, Familiar Touch, earned critical acclaim at the Venice International Film Festival last year, where she received both the Lion of the Future - Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Debut Film and the Horizons Award for Best Director. In addition to Friedland’s honors, the film’s lead actress Kathleen Chalfant received the award for Best Actress, making Familiar Touch the most awarded film selected for the Horizons category in the festival’s history. On the heels of her success at Venice, she won an Independent Spirit Award in the “Someone to Watch” category. Familiar Touch is currently being released in theaters worldwide. Her previous work has been showcased at leading art venues and festivals, including the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, BFI, MoMA, BAM, and the Performa Biennial. She has received support from institutions including Film at Lincoln Center, the Jerome Foundation, Panavision, Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum, and Berlinale Talents. In 2023, Friedland was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film and from 2021 to 2022 was both a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video. She is a graduate of Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media. For the last eight years, Sarah has been working in creative aging, as a care companion to New York City artists with dementia and cognitive impairment, a facilitator of intergenerational film projects, and a teaching artist working in older adult communities.
Michelle Memran is Atlantic Fellow, Global Brain Health Institute and an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and visual artist working in dementia awareness and creative aging advocacy.
Cynthia Stone has been creating social justice documentary-style pieces for nearly three decades. Her work has appeared regionally on KQED, and nationally on PBS, The BBC/PRI, and The Discovery Channel, among others. She has won multiple regional Emmy, Society of Professional Journalists, and Press Club awards. Having covered education, the environment, health, poverty, and equity issues, she’s inspired to highlight people and programs finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The wisdom and humor of those in this film helped her better connect with, and care for, her own mother throughout her aging process from her vital active years through her memory loss.
Stacy Kono is the executive director of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network, a national network of employers of nannies, housecleaners and home attendants.