Mam

For her first film, stage actress and performer Adelheid Roosen stayed close to home. With Mum, she shot a deeply intimate portrait of her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The illness has destroyed her stern, formal personality. It made the mother Roosen used to know disappear and instead the girl and child inside emerged. In a series of static tableaux - all shot in the nursing home - the daughters, sister and son-in-law enter into their mother's emotional world. Painting with her sister at a desk, sitting in bath with her eldest daughter and eating chocolates in bed with her son-in-law. Roosen cuddles up to the babbling, vulnerable woman, dressed in the same 'Alzheimer uniform' of a bra, tights and incontinence diaper. With Mam, Roosen expressly wants to break out of the cliché. Her choices may be confronting, her affectionate approach is beyond dispute.