A feature documentary film
Sheltering Love
SYNOPSIS
A story about caregiving
A tenacious daughter confronts the challenge of her life when she becomes a caregiver to her mother, Love, who has Alzheimer’s disease. As her mother’s lifetime savings rapidly dwindle, Dawn struggles to keep Love safe at home and out of a nursing home while fighting to save her own precarious future.
In 2013, Dawn was living in Los Angeles when she received word that Love had wandered miles away from her home in New Jersey. Dawn made the monumental decision to leave her life in LA to move back into her childhood home to care for her ill mother. With no previous caregiving experience, she wrestles with the grim reality of what it actually means to be a caregiver of someone with dementia in the United States.
As Dawn’s life becomes consumed by caregiving, she loses all sense of her own identity. When she finally recognizes that she needs help, she reaches out to the local Alzheimer’s organization and joins a support group where she learns how to cope and care for herself and her mother. For a brief moment, things appear to be under control.
But then Dawn is faced with the biggest challenge of all: Alzheimer’s disease is the most expensive disease in the United States, costing more than cancer and heart disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. In the last five years of life, the average person with dementia spends $287,000, which most families cannot afford. Medical expenses bankrupt the majority of dementia patients who then become eligible for Medicaid. Alzheimer’s is not just bankrupting families, it is also slowly bankrupting American taxpayers who ultimately cover these costs.
Dawn begins 2019 with six months to figure out a solution until her mother’s savings and long-term health care insurance run out. How can Dawn save her family and navigate one of the most intricate healthcare systems in the world?
Desperate for a solution, Dawn travels to Love’s native country of Norway to see what solutions are possible in another healthcare system. In Norway, Dawn discovers that there are other ways of managing the care of people with dementia. Through the use of innovative care and technology, the Norwegians have been able to dramatically reduce the costs associated with dementia care. Armed with this knowledge, Dawn returns to the United States with the hopes of bringing this information to her local lawmakers.
Autobiographical in nature, this story is told through first-person narration from the POV of the filmmaker. The self-reflexive style of the film includes the filmmaker actively engaging in events shot vérité style in real time, and conducting personal interviews with other caregivers, medical professionals, and family members. Back story is poetically revealed through home videos, archival materials, and animation.
SHELTERING LOVE seeks to bring awareness to the plight of the caregiver, and to offer hope that even though a cure or treatment does not currently exist for Alzheimer’s, there is still so much that can be done to improve the lives of those struggling with the disease.
Approximately 90 minutes. HD Format.
Currently in production.