Stir Q&A: Love: The Last Chapter director moved right into longterm care home to film subjects
Dominique Keller walked the walk to take on ageism with moving new NFB documentary at DOXA
Filmmaker Dominique Keller
BEFORE PANDEMIC CHAOS, filmmaker Dominique Keller went inside a Calgary longterm care home to profile a curiously taboo subject: the love lives of elderly couples.
The result is Love: The Last Chapter, an NFB film opening at DOXA Documentary Film Festival starting today, a moving look at how connection and intimacy help people through the hardships of declining health and mobility.
Keller and her camera are there for some of her subjects’ most private moments, whether it’s facing judgment from relatives, confiding their fear of death, making each other toast in the dining hall, or simply holding each other on a hospital bed.
We talked to Keller about how she built that trust with her subjects, as well as about aging, cafeteria food, the pandemic, our deep-seated fears of the elderly as sexual beings, and what it was like moving right into a longterm care facility.
Did you have much experience with elderly family members or was this unknown terrain for you?
“When I started making the film, my grandmother was beginning to have some challenges living independently. I had the strange experience of making a film set in a senior’s facility while simultaneously helping my grandmother to decide whether or not it was the right choice for her to move into one. This is also my third documentary that focuses on issues around aging. I am fascinated by late-in-life stories. As a society we tend to avoid thinking about and talking about old age. I have always been one to point out the elephants in the room; I guess that’s why I have chosen to focus on the taboo subject of physical and emotional intimacy in old age.”
These couples let you in on some of their most personal moments. How did you establish that trust with them and find a way to “disappear” into these small spaces where they live?
“Slowly… over lots of coffee. Developing a relationship with a documentary subject is the same as developing any meaningful relationship: it takes time and effort. I invested a lot of my time into getting to know the people you see in front of the camera. There are many moments I filmed, but there are also many moments I did not film. The subjects of this film also invested a lot of time getting to know me. We kind of supported one another throughout the filmmaking process. That intimacy and the access I gained only came about because of that time.”
You spent a month living in the seniors facility. What was the biggest adjustment you had to make living there?
“Living with my subjects changed everything about how I both viewed them and how I allowed them to tell their story. Before I lived in the facility, I was comfortable in my own independence. I had the freedom to come and go as I pleased. The food they ate looked pretty good, and I was impressed by the array of programs available. Moving into the lodge, I had to agree to sign out whenever I left the building and to sign out for any meals I was missing. I was handed the menu for the month. I ate three meals a day there and all of my nutritional choices were no longer my own.
“I would eat what was served. It seems like a small thing, but it’s hard to lose small pieces of your freedom and independence. I remember unpacking my bags and lying down in my single bed. Light came in through the crack under the door from the hallway. I could hear people moving around outside. I lay awake in bed all night, wondering if anyone would even check on me, if I would actually make any friends, and if I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
“I really wanted to understand the core struggle. But being embedded in the facility, even for a month, really affected my sense of identity. That first evening I actually had a little meltdown!
“It took a few weeks to acclimatize. I followed all the rules of the facility, signing in and out, and I ate all my meals there and took activity classes. I slept there every night. I spent a lot of time in the residents-only area, because I really wanted to be part of the community.”
We’ve seen the devastation that pandemic lockdown and isolation has had on these facilities. What are your fears about the effects of that, having been on the inside?
“My experience of living on the ‘inside’ is that there is a constant tension between the desire to promote health and safety and the desire to have a high quality of life. There is a scene in the film where a family member expresses that she is opposed to a budding romance because ‘seniors are frail’ and rolling around on a bed could cause an arm to break, or worse. The pandemic has exponentially increased the tension between quality of life and health and safety. COVID-19 has made society hyper-focused on the physical safety of seniors. Seniors, especially those who live in residences, have also experienced prolonged periods of quarantine. I worry about the longterm impacts of this isolation on their mental health.
“The pandemic has also given us all a taste of what it is like to lose many freedoms due to safety concerns. Many of the losses I experienced during the pandemic, such as the loss of the ability to go to a restaurant or the gym or to see a friend, are similar to the losses people at the senior’s lodge felt due to their decreased mobility and health concerns. My hope is that the experiences we have all had of losing our freedoms due to the pandemic will help us to better understand what it is like as an older adult to lose the freedom to live independently.”
Have you come any closer to understanding why we, as a society, seem to deny or neglect seniors' need for connection and intimacy late in life?
"What I have come to understand is that love and intimacy are lifelong pursuits. We never ever stop wanting to give love and to be loved. Unfortunately, ageist erotophobia—the deep-seated fears many in society hold about older people as sexual beings, often expressed as disgust—has led to very different views about the intimate lives of older adults. Often under the banner of ‘health and safety’ the romantic desires of older adults are seen as problematic and unnatural.
"I actually think the fears and disgust that many of us feel when contemplating intimacy in old age are linked to a general societal fear of old age and death. If we allow older adults to be sexual beings, then we also allow them to be ‘more like us.’ If we allow older adults to be ‘more like us,’ then we must also accept the fact that we are all going to die. Of course, intellectually we all know that someday we will die, but emotionally it is an incredibly difficult thing to accept. So instead of dealing with our own fears of old age and dying, we deny older adults their right to love and intimacy."
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