“Familiar Touch” captures the loneliness of forgetting coupled with the joy of rediscovering what it means to feel alive. The drama, which is written and directed by Sarah Friedland, became a critical hit after it premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival where it was later acquired by Music Box Films.
“Familiar Touch” stars Tony Award nominee Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth Goldman, an older woman with dementia who realizes that her “hotel” is actually an assisted living facility. Of course, this realization happens once she is about to go on a date.
The official synopsis reads: “While Ruth resists identifying with her aging neighbors, she connects with the care workers there (Carolyn Michelle and Andy McQueen) and is drawn towards her son (H. Jon Benjamin), whom she mistakes for a suitor. A former cook, Ruth finds agency preparing meals in the facility kitchen. She slides into younger selves as she embraces the sensory experiences of the community’s activities and daily life. But when the reality of her situation sinks in, Ruth feels betrayed and flees the facility in search of something familiar.”
Friedland previously was employed as a memory care worker and still teaches art to older adults. “Familiar Touch” is being praised as an authentic ode to the transformations of living with impaired memory. The IndieWire review deemed the film to be an “achingly intimate drama” that flourishes by “staying so firmly in Ruth’s perspective and her changing world.” IndieWire’s Kate Erbland applauded lead star Chalfant for being “wonderfully emotive” onscreen.
Friedland told IndieWire that “Familiar Touch” is meant to challenge the assumption that people living with dementia are no longer “present” in a cognitive since. “Having worked with older adults, I have come to think about identity not just being expressed through our cognition and through our language, but about self-expression and identity also [as] something embodied and physical,” Friedland said. “People think about aging spaces as spaces of death and decline, and yes, people are living out the last years of their lives, but there’s so much joy and creativity and consciousness.”
Music Box Films will release “Familiar Touch” June 20 at Film Forum in New York and June 27 in Los Angeles, and will be expanding nationally in select markets. Check out the trailer below.
