Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter

Deborah Hoffmann: If I tell someone that I made a film about my mother, and my mother has Alzheimer's, invariably he or she get an extremely long face and says, "I'm so sorry." And then if I tell them that I've made a humorous film about my mother's Alzheimer's — if anything they would probably think that I'm an insensitive, weird person. I think that the taboo that I broke was that, without being disrespectful to my mother and her situation, I admitted that this is a funny situation. If it was in any other setting, everybody would laugh. The caregivers are really at their wit's end. They are doing very crazy, insane things, and it's ok to see the humor in it. In fact, even my mother sees the humor in it. And once I allowed myself to ease up and see the humor, my mother felt a lot better. She enjoyed laughing about all of it.