Film review: Don’t Forget to Remember is a haunting experience

By turns terrifying, uplifting, and defiantly optimistic, this film centres around Alzheimer's

Asbestos at work

• Don’t Forget to Remember 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinematic Release

“This is going to be true and false,” says the Dublin street artist Asbestos at the beginning of Don’t Forget to Remember (PG), a documentary about his mother Helena’s experience of Alzheimer’s and his creative response to her loss of memory and identity.

There are excruciating scenes early on in the film as the gentle, smiling Helena patiently sits through her husband’s attempts to prompt her memories, and a particularly heart-breaking moment when we realise that Helena can’t even remember the word for ‘mother’.

Directed by Ross Killeen, the story revolves around the artist’s attempts to deploy his public-facing art to address the very private family concerns as they try to come to terms with the devastation wrought by Alzheimer’s — one solution is to create a series of family portraits in chalk on blackboard, and then expose them to the elements to recreate the horror of a personality being gradually eroded.

It’s an ambitious film, and not least because there are no pat answers available, nor easy consolations; but while the overall mood is
understandably downbeat, there are shafts of light on the rare occasions when Helena manages to successfully grasp at a sliver of reminiscence.

By turns terrifying, uplifting, and defiantly optimistic, Don’t Forget to Remember is a haunting experience.