Documentary Movie Review – Alive Inside

Tweet

No spoiler alerts required for this highly moving non-fiction documentary subtitled A Story Of Music And Memory, on a project to bring simple hope and joy to people in nursing homes and Alzheimer’s sufferers in particular through music. Director, and narrator Michael Rossato-Bennett was invited to film the work of hospital visiting social worker Dan Cohen for just a day – what he saw kept him filming for three years. Cohen was visiting patients in nursing homes and getting them to listen to I-Pod recordings of their favourite music, with songs ranging from the work of Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway to the Beatles and The Beach Boys. The effect on patients was bordering on miraculous. Many who had barely spoken or moved in years were opening up to discuss memories of the way they found the songs as children. One lady had seen Lois Armstrong playing live in her childhood. A few patients were getting up to dance. Cohen realized the value of having music therapy in nursing homes and presenting many patients and elderly people prescribed an I-pod player to listen to in their rooms, but getting the medical profession to take his recommendations seriously proved to be an uphill struggle. The film, which features great insights from psychologist Oliver Sachs and the musician, Bobby McFerrin, itself was completed through crowd-funding and when footage was released on Reddit and Youtube, many young people rallied to the cause helping to buy in i-pods for distribution to nursing throughout the US, though the work of the Memory And Music foundation run on a non-profit basis by Cohen. The film is full of delights and also carries a quiet under-stated anger at a health system that routinely medicates the elderly with similar sedative drugs to those used on psychiatric patients, when many of the elderly are just intensely lonely and withdrawn, as their precious memories erode away. Music proves to be an early primal drive in us – many babies are known to imitate the sounds of the mothers in early cries and gurgles, indicating that we pick up on rhythms and sounds even in the womb. Our sense of music is often among the last of us to switch off as we age. Music through an i-pod that could last years can brng greater happiness and relaxation than expensive drugs that often achieve nothing. Cohen’s work clearly deserves to be taken extremely seriously in the US, UK, Europe and beyond. From the viewing and discussion that followed it, this was undoubtedly the most important movie in the UClan Preston University Comensus One In Four film festival. A Youtube clip from the movie capturing one of the moving transformation stories told Arthur Chappell