The Camden International Film Festival
There are more than leaves to peep at if you're in Maine this weekend. The
Camden International Film Festival, now in its seventh year,
might not be the biggest such event in the region, but it certainly is one of
the most focused, best programmed, and most provocative, dedicated as it is to the art of
documentary, certainly one of the most influential and vital genres today.
Among the films screening tomorrow is
Scott Kirschenbaum's "You're
Looking At Me Like I Live Here And I Don't." The title is a comment
that Lee Gorewitz, a patient at a very pleasant California Alzheimer's facility,
makes to one of the stuffed animals she refers to her as her babies. Kirschenbaum's camera follows Lee like her bewildered consciousness, a sounding
board for her observations about her condition and situation: deprived of
memory, unable to speak except in broken fragments of disparate conversations,
but still showing the ghost of the wit, mirth, and pugnacity that she once
possessed. "I've never been like this in my life," she says, with a trace of
wonder. It's not a depressing or pitiful
portrait, but it is sometimes terrifying, as when Lee fumbles for a word and
says, "I've lost how to find it." Or when she looks at a family picture and, asked where she is in the photography, replies, "I am not." It's wrenching,
sometimes funny, and profound. As with most of the movies at CIFF, the director
will be at the screening for a discussion.
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