Companions

With an empathetic and intimate lens, veteran filmmaker Denys Desjardins captures his elderly mother's experience of neglect in Quebec's healthcare system and his sister's fight to secure her an acceptable long-term care solution.

ATENTAMENTE is a film that, through the sensation of the time passing by and the presence of the death that wanders into a nursing home, allows us to feel the life through the illusion that love brings along. Libardo and Alba, a couple of elders who met each other at the nursing home where they live, they fall for, they become boyfriends and start to struggle in order to find fifty thousand pesos to rent a room for one night at a hotel so they can have a privacy moment, since at the nursing home where they live is not possible to have that. While struggling they must face each other, face their fears, their limitations, their pains, their time as well as their fragility so they can construct that moment in which they meet love. A struggle that seems to be easy, but for them is an odyssey against time, against their limitations and their own ghosts.

Third Act is a film about aging. Leo is 80 years old and tours the world with the internationally renowned dance-theatre company Peeping Tom. On stage Leo is condemned to an elderly home crowded by local extras in their third age. But in real life, his wife waits for him - in an elderly home in Belgium. What do you do in the third and last act of your life? And what do the elderly in other countries and cultures do when the curtain is about to fall?

In a nursing home, a young man visits his grandmother. As she constantly repeats that she wants to go home, his grandson visits her now empty apartment, seeking to capture memories of a fading past.

A group of elders spends their weekdays in a retirement home in Sandim, in the north of Portugal, where they talk, do arts and crafts, practice yoga and pray. We follow them between October 2012 and March 2013, when an economic crisis overshadowed Portuguese society and unemployment rates reached record levels. Meanwhile, arrangements are made for the Carnival ball. Will they bring the first place home this time?

Every week, two friends born 67 years apart share their life stories in a senior home's living room. The younger friend convinces the 107-year-old lady to join her in an adventure: a road trip to the sea.

In the midst of the social unrest caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in Calpan, Puebla, there is a small corner where hope is harvested daily: the people's asylum.

In a decaying Soviet-era retirement home, a vibrant group of elders cling to life by staging Shakespeare. Yet loneliness lingers beyond the theater’s doors, until drama begins to blur with reality.

In the Romanian town of Craiova, five hundred elderly people are passing their days in a home, for which they pay with their paltry pensions. Every day looks the same, every activity is predictable. Even the people‘s complaints are part of the daily routine. One of the residents hopes in vain that a lottery ticket will bring him refuge. For six days, filmmakers Andreea Paduraru and Cristi Puiu try to get through to these people, who are carrying their whole past on their backs. To the question what the best days of their lives was, nobody can or wants to give an answer. Nearly everyone immediately starts about the day-to-day worries and problems in the home. Finally, one woman tells about her activities as head of the research department of the government of Ceausescu, with whom she once had an argument. Another resident recalls his time as a soldier in World War II and proceeds to the order of the day.

Memoirs of the Italian Opera by the singers and musicians of the Casa Verdi, Milan, the world’s first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. This documentary, which has achieved cult-like status among opera and music lovers, features former singers who reminisce about their careers and their past operatic roles.