A work-in-progress participant at the 2023 American Film Festival in Wroclaw (which turned out to be a vintage edition with Indie Donaldson’s Good One and Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point also being selected) Sarah Friedland was putting the finishing touches on her feature debut which would be selected for the Orizzonti (Horizons) section at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and leaving with a trio of prizes: the Luigi de Laurentiis Lion of the Future prize for best first film, the Best Director award, while Kathleen Chalfant won the Best Actress award. Described as a new kind of coming-of-age story (for the octogenarian set), Familiar Touch is a poignant drama confronts the limitations imposed by dementia, but works with different set of narrative parameters — it’s not a portrait solely on the setbacks of memory loss, but what the functions we gain and how that manifests itself. I had the chance to discuss the film with Sarah (who comes from documentary/experimental and video installation background and was the winner of the Someone to Watch Award at the Indie Spirits last year) and her lead actress at the Venice Film Festival – we discussed the visual narrative strategy, how it was to work on the location and some of the red flag or green flags that she wanted within the film. After a lengthy tour on the film festival circuit, Music Box Films launch the film theatrically today.
