Ben Watts reviews the above short film, Where Do Lilacs Come From, which movingly portrays the perspective of a man with Alzheimer’s:
Writers are often told: “Write what you know”. For Where Do Lilacs Come From, [writer/director Matthew] Thorne did just that, ripping a band-aid off painful true-life events and dramatizing them for the screen. “I had a lot of memories from when I was younger of my dad losing his mother to Alzheimer’s,” Thorne said. “[Those memories] really became the genesis for the film — particularly the pain my dad went through. It was a very strange experience being reintroduced to your Grandmother every day as though she had never met you…You almost start to wonder whether that’s normal. I really wanted to tell a story from her perspective — what it might be like to live in a world where present and past don’t have a clear delineation.” On that front, Thorne excels magnificently, tapping into the dreamlike-quality of memory loss with precision. The extent of Chris’ Alzheimer’s is not apparent until Michael holds up a framed photograph and shows it to his father.
“That’s Mom,” Michael says. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
“She’s probably in the house,” Chris says.
“No. Mom’s gone now.”
“Oh,” Chris says, pointing to a man in the picture. “Does he know?”
Michael takes a deep breath, trying to keep his composure. “That’s you, Dad.”
The Dish 