DON’T FORGET TO REMEMBER (Ross Killeen, 2024)
Don’t Forget To Remember (Ross Killeen, 2024)
Everyone has an idea of Alzheimers, what it can take from people, what it does to a family and the suffering it causes. It’s terrifying. Ross Killeen’s, Don’t Forget To Remember (2024), takes on this colossally terrifying thing, through the power of art.
The film features artist, Asbestos, most notably known for his street art, if you’ve been to the Sunflower, (which we have, a lot), you’ll have seen his work, LET ME UNSEE, pictured below.
LET ME UNSEE (Asbestos, 2022)
In this film, he takes on an artistic challenge of a different type of scale, in responding to his mother Helena’s Alzheimers. We see typical of the condition it is worsening over time, with the doctor telling his father that she won’t be able to do things for herself as it progresses. Time is precious, and although through terrible circumstances it seems to pull everything into perspective and give the artist a new vision of his parents and evolve their relationship. So he does as any creative person must and responds with his art.
Throughout the film, he draws on blackboards with chalk from photographs, significant to his mother. We imagine photographs as the literal actual physical embodiment of memories, tangible snapshots of something so worth remembering, you took out a camera and dedicated some film, or these days some MB toward it. It might be said then that photos are only meaningful with context, it’s why photos of the sunset on your holiday are special to you but just the sky to someone else. As Helena’s memories fade, photos of important events become photos of someone else’s life, but this is why art, image, and photography ARE important. The photos and the memories, while losing meaning for Helena, matter intensely for her family who takes on the burden of memory for her, and as you watch the film, you will too, you will remember her and her life.
When Asbestos commits these photos to chalk, he is speaking to the nature of memory, beautiful, important, but oh so fragile and precious. The chalkboards are then distributed across significant places, the location of his mother’s childhood home, left in range of the tide of the beach, by Dublin Airport Church where his parents got married and the stables where his father's horses are. He does this in the expectation that the elements will wash them away or people will alter, graffiti or even destroy the chalkboards and the art upon them. He even leaves chalk and an eraser with a message welcoming people to do as they please with them. This is the nature of life, death and memory, to exist is to be born and live fragile, then changed, faded out, replaced, washed away, and then simply remembered, in mind or in a photograph, it’s what makes life and this film, precious, it’s a cataloguing of a life in chalk before the rain washes it away.
Don’t Forget To Remember (Ross Killeen, 2024)
The film is intimate and conversational, Ross Killeen, who has faced similar struggles within his family, losing his mother to Alzheimer’s, has made the film in such an incredibly gentle way that we are privy to extremely personal conversations without it ever feeling like prying into somewhere we shouldn’t be. A motif in the film are these wonderful conversations on a bench between Asbestos and father, or with his mother or between just his parents, we are physically at a distance from these conversations, those having them are turned away from the camera, but we are so included emotionally. Some conversations are brutally honest. His father, calmly, patiently and lovingly, assists his wife through her journey. He talks of the he guilt feels and the challenges of seeing someone you love change. The film is intimate, as is the art created for it. It is a powerful testament to the ability of art; contextualising, understanding and sometimes aiding in the process of healing traumas.
The director stated before the film began that he wanted to initiate conversations about the taboo subject of Alzheimer’s. This film, I’m sure will certainly begin some stark, difficult and healing conversations with those who see it and the loved ones they share its message with.
I know that after the film the only thing I wanted to do was call my mother, and if you’re privileged enough to be able to, then do.
