Intentions Part 3 - WHY MAKE A FILM ABOUT MEMORY LOSS?

I am interested in the idea that for many people in the western world the idea of what old age entails is changing.  It is less and less experienced as a period of gentle retirement followed by a swift end, more often a protracted decent into oblivion, a process opposite but almost perfectly symmetrical to childhood.

It seems people are realising that this eventuality should be fully embraced and planned for, not left to the state or other family members to cope with.  Particularly since families rarely care for their elderly relatives in their own homes, people in the west are going to have to start to make active provision for their last years if they want to die with dignity, without resolving to a one-way ticket to Switzerland, which shouldn't be necessary if unbearable pain is not an issue.

Having grown up with those around me losing their past has made me acutely aware of the fragility of consciousness and of our fortune in being able to appreciate the present moment in a state of full awareness.  At the same time I think I am as afraid as anyone else to contemplate the disintegration of my own consciousness, and I see this fear as as good a reason as any to embark on a journey that may or may not result in a film.  

I hope to create a film which shifts into the un-logic of a mind left with an unreliable memory, dependent on the stimulus of the near present.  I want to find a way for the film to enter into the immediacy of my sister's world, the mundane yet beautiful time in her garden, her conversations with her cat, the observing of the weather which she can never compare day by day, the mountains, the distant and blurry childhood memories that merge into each other with every passing year, the sense of safety to be found in the routine of pills and meals, the taking of rubbish to the bins, the picking of leaves for the neighbor's rabbits.

In the meantime, I want to intersperse my research into the science of the mind, inter-cutting fragments of scientific information from my searches for facts.  What is memory? What do scientists understand is happening to my sister's mind? And my father and grandmother's minds? Will I too lose my reason? What might I do to protect what I have?

Brain tests, brain scans, brain damage. Language. Images. Behavior.  Why do we forget things in reverse?  Is there a cure to forgetting on the horizon or is that the stuff of science fiction? Is the slide into unconsciousness the most natural way to die? Should Jacqueline my sister bother to take her pills? Is there any hope?

Although my sister Jacqueline is the point of orientation for me at the moment, the person through which I can understand this issue more intensely than anyone else, it may be that she does not feature directly in whatever it is I eventually produce, or am I only writing this because I am afraid of the difficult ethical questions making such a personal film is likely to throw up.
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