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Familiar Touch film image; hands wrapping around someone to hug them

Familiar Touch

Vanguard

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Canadian Premiere

In her elegant feature debut, film artist and choreographer Sarah Friedland delivers a deceptively conventional study of an elderly woman’s transition to assisted living. Filmed at an actual care home, the attention to mundane detail and peripheral workplace dynamics are particularly resonant, anchoring and contextualizing the character’s dementia-driven spiral.

Drawing from her previous, movement-focused work, the director is interested in the physical expression of cognitive decline, mining the moments of stillness, apparent clarity, and repetitive tasks that the body and mind cling to when one starts to lose one’s grip on reality. Kathleen Chalfant commands the screen with absolute poise in her thoughtfully mannered portrait of a woman trying to hold on to her dignity. Each gesture, line, and action are precisely calibrated to convey her altered perception. This is a rare, poignant take on the subject that looks from the inside out with an impressively sober lens.

 

Best Director: Orizzonti, Venice 2024; Best Actress: Orizzonti, Venice 2024; Lion of the Future Award for Debut Film, Venice 2024

 

Presented by

Media Partner

Director
Cast

Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle Smith, Andy McQueen, H. Jon Benjamin

Credits
Country of Origin

USA

Year

2024

Language

English

Film Contact
18+
90 min
Award Winners Drama Family Relations Women Directors
Rathaus Films

Book Tickets

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Credits & Director

Producer

Alexandra Byer, Sarah Friedland, Matthew Thurm

Screenwriter

Sarah Friedland

Cinematography

Gabe C. Elder

Editor

Aacharee “Ohm” UngsriwongEntered

Production Design

Stephanie Osin Cohen

Sarah Friedland headshot; Familiar Touch director

Sarah Friedland

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her projects have been presented at festivals like the New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAM, and in venues such as MoMA and Performa19 Biennial. A Brown University graduate, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023”. Her debut feature, Familiar Touch, premiered at the 81st Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti Competition.

Photo by Anna Ritsch

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