Dementia on Screen

This is a book about the stories that films tell about dementia and the varied ways it’s depicted in films from around the world. Dementia is a progressive disease linked to ageing which ranks among the leading causes of death worldwide, for which the cause remains unknown and there is no cure. Drawing on its incidence in his own family, Michael Chanan explores how films represent the condition: what they show, how they show it, and what they don’t show and steer away from. Set within medical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts, the book surveys both the modes of documentary and the varieties of fiction, from tragedy and melodrama to black comedy and the thriller. It also traces the contrast between the medicalisation of dementia dominating films from the Global North and those from the Global South, where medicalisation and social care are underdeveloped, and the sufferer is perceived less as an atomised individual than as inextricably interwoven with the social order.