After the recent documentary on BBC1, ‘Mum and me’, about Ethel, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's, and her family, I felt very pleased and privileged to be able to ring and speak to my own aged mum. What had she thought about the programme? ‘I really admire her daughter for making such a truthful film. And it's scary’.
It is, of course, reasonable to be scared of Alzheimer's, both on an individual and a societal level. What this film did was to confront (some would say, in a confrontational way) the reality of living with the disease and to help families doing so to acknowledge and share the difficulty, the fear, the frustration and the pain.
The filmmaker, Sue Bourne, …