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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Alive Inside: The Power of Music Disclaimer: I am biased in my approach to this film. I love music, and I’m in my very, very, very late 40s.
“Alive Inside” tells the story of Dan Cohen who discovered that when people suffering from age-related memory loss—my preferred term for the various kinds of ways we lose memory—are given iPods with headphone playing musics from their past, they come alive.
Cohen’s story arc is one of struggling to make available iPods and headphones for every resident in every nursing home in the United States, to finding multiple funding sources, getting on CNN, and more importantly, having a short video of a resident listening to music for the first time in many years seen by millions of people via social media.
And now, of course, Cohen’s arc includes this totally inspiring documentary that not only tells his story. but gives an outline history of how the United States has taken care of and not taken care of the elderly.
Writer/director Michael Rossato-Bennett juxtaposes jaw-dropping clips of elderly people finding aliveness and new meaning in their lives with equally powerful interviews of physicians and others who, on the basis of both their experience and authority, provide solid support for Cohen’s observations and mission.
“Alive Inside” is a must-see.
Dan Cohen’s mission is now represented by the website Music and Memory.D. Schwartz August 17, 2014