This newspaper’s Simplex crossword plays a significant, and moving, role in this fine collaboration on the struggle to understand and accommodate Alzheimer’s disease. The film opens with an older gentleman asking his wife how you might begin a story. “Once upon a time?” he suggests. Another voice tells us that what we are about to hear will be both “true and false.” We return to the older man as he tries to edge his wife towards a four-letter clue.
These are the parents of Asbestos – busy, imaginative visual artist – and the crossword looks to have become a daily ritual as his mother struggles to remain connected with the surrounding world. It’s a nice framing touch in a film that rarely takes you where you expect to go. Ross Killeen, director of the excellent Damien Dempsey doc Love Yourself Today, imposes his own singular touch, but the documentary seems almost indecently personal to Asbestos and his family. These are the conversations we don’t look forward to having in public.
Don’t Forget to Remember (also the title of a fine Bee Gees number from their prehistory) often plays in conventional observational style. We hear a great deal from the family as father and son do their best to communicate with their sometimes confused relative. There is a sense of them re-creating memories she no longer has. “Do you remember when he told us he was doing street art?” Dad says of Asbestos. “You weren’t too happy about that.” The artist sweetly notes that every time his mother sees a picture of him, she laughs.
All this is intercut with home-movie footage that, as well as reminding us how such visuals are more resonant than contemporary smartphone footage, presses home the poignant contrast between recollections lost and images retained. How unsettling that inanimate media can do what we cannot.
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The film is, however, also in discussion with Asbetos’s art. The impermanence of one chalk-based project has obvious parallels with what goes on in the brain. Elsewhere, altered footage illustrates his mother’s memories of a close shave at the time of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Throughout it all, we never lose focus on the core sadness at the film’s heart. A fascinating and rigorous piece of work.
Don’t Forget to Remember is in cinemas from Friday, September 6th
