About that love

2019 / KRONCRV - NPO 2

NL

In 2012, I decided to film my parents, after my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years earlier. Using audio recordings of his past sermons, we hear how he once inspired his congregation as a pastor and gain a closer understanding of the strong, socially engaged man he used to be. His growing confusion increasingly requires care from my mother. Her struggle with exhaustion and the changing nature of their marriage leads to a difficult decision meant to bring peace. After his unexpected death, my mother, guided by her faith, looks back on this confronting period. She dreams of the times when everything was still well and cautiously looks ahead to their eventual reunion. Each time I visited my mother when she was alone, I took a photograph of her.

“Reaching for words, fragments of understanding. How should you dress? Why tuck that blouse into his pants, and how? What is all this fuss? What do they want from him? Why does his wife act so strangely? Why must he leave the house for a while? Heartbreaking to witness this unraveling so close up. There is nothing to soften this disease. Yet everything is filmed with care and love.

The pastor never had a day off. He always had to be there. Did the lifelong pressure play a role in his susceptibility to this particular disease? It is briefly suggested. For a long time, you cannot see anything wrong from the outside. His sense of humor remains intact. Gradually, Pieter lives more and more in the moment, disoriented whenever his wife leaves the room even briefly.”

“Inevitably, the moment comes when she, too, no longer knows and breaks into tears, as even the simplest actions and sentences stop making sense. He doesn’t understand. What a terrible disease. One can only hope that the search for medications to slow or even halt it continues. Footage of the pastor himself, preaching in the past—clear, passionate, beautifully articulated—stands in stark contrast to the images of him now, staring into a chair or walking in the wind. His doctor tells the filmmaker: ‘Your father has always evoked images with words; that was his profession. It is tragic to see how that has now been taken from him.’

As an Alzheimer’s patient, he loses his sense of overview, yet mentally deteriorating, he remains attentive—the fruit of a life-long devotion. The memory of caring, touching, embracing, holds on the longest. Both feel supported, by God. We are not watching a hollow, empty wind tunnel of decline—this is remarkable. Yet, oh, how it pains. Even for the viewer. The year has just begun, but I doubt anything on TV in 2019 will move audiences more than this. It makes real life visible, and the suffering within it. Compared to this, so much slick, shallow television pales. That, truly, is a wind tunnel of emptiness, compared to this story of love, faith, and loss.” (Hilbrand Rozema / Nederlands Dagblad

Camera, regie, geluid en montage: Jaap van den Beukel Samenstelling en montage: Pascale Korteweg Soundmix: Fokke van Saane