Unforgettable journey: From actress to Alzheimer’s advocate
Unforgettable journey: From actress to Alzheimer’s advocate. Review of ‘While you are’, a documentary directed and written by Claudia Pinto and starring Carme Elías.
By Staff
Winner of the Gaudí and the Goya for best documentary film.
Since Carme Elías announced in 2022 that she suffers from Alzheimer’s, the public has been able to witness how the renowned actress is battling the disease. Being an example of light in the present and performing an exercise of exceptional vitality.
Perhaps for this reason, the premiere of ‘While you are’, a documentary that narrates the process of accepting the condition and which is up for the Goya for best non-fiction feature film, seems so timely at this time.
‘While you are’ is more than a documentary, it is the personal testimony of a woman who sees how her own head becomes her worst enemy. The way the film was conceived is heartbreaking.
Claudia Pinto and Carme Elías are friends. The Venezuelan filmmaker coincided with the Spanish actress in her debut film, ‘The Longest Distance’, in which she played a woman who is the victim of a terminal illness and who decides to go to the mountains to die.
It was during the production in the Canary Islands of Pinto’s second feature film, ‘The Consequences’, which was also the second collaboration between the director and the performer, when Elías admitted to Pinto that she was forgetting the texts and when the symptoms of this began to be visible disease.
The filmmaker also witnessed the diagnosis and it was there that this third feature film emerged, which closes an improvised trilogy in which Elías has played a fundamental role.
Initially filmed in secret, since the diagnosis was not made public until two years after the filming of ‘The Consequences’ and one year after its premiere.
‘While it’s you’ is the portrait of a woman who wanted to have her mind exercised and occupied, who has begun to negotiate with an illness that has forced her to focus purely on the present, to show that she is a person who has decided to stand up. face of the disease and that makes visible the desire to die with dignity, thus entering a swampy terrain with regard to euthanasia, legal in Spain since 2021.
Pinto shows immense respect and affection for Elías, it is felt in each sequence, in which personal and intimate moments are transmitted with extraordinary warmth.
The film also shows the actress going to different film events or meeting friends and colleagues, as in the case of Argentine theater director Juan Carlos Corazza.
Added to this is that the film does not forget that it is also an opportunity to pay tribute to the actress during her life and at a time when she is still able to remember and enjoy that experience.
What is fascinating is how Pinto recovers archive images, sequences of productions in which Elías has appeared and regain a different meaning in this proposal, already one of the favorites to win the Goya for best documentary feature film after having won the Gaudí on the 4th of February.
Winner of a ‘Cabezón’ for her magnificent performance in ‘Camino’, the author already demonstrated with the publication of her memoir, ‘When it’s no longer me’, her desire that her experiences and memories can remain beyond his own head.
‘While you are you’ is part of that creative virtuous circle of an artist who wants to live as long as his illness allows and who refuses to let himself be defeated.
Done with the utmost respect, it is also a great tribute from friend to friend. A demonstration also that, in the end, only the here and now remains. An example of the power of non-fiction on the retina.
