Kirsten Johnson has been associated with multiple (close to 70) documentary films and is perhaps best known for CAMERAPERSON, a 2016 release documenting her oeuvre. She has directed 6 films herself.
Upon learning in 2017 of her father’s slowly progressive dementia, Ms. Johnson decided to document the winter of his years in an unusual, creative manner, staging his mock death in multiple ways at various times. It is a simultaneous visual love letter and exploration of human mortality.
Spoiler alert: Dick Johnson is still alive, but has moved to Bethesda, MD, to a care facility near his son after relocating from Seattle, where he had a psychiatry practice, to NYC, where his daughter lives.
I have had two family members with dementia: a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law. Perhaps with some irony, they both lived in the same care facility before their…
