Noe Valley filmmaker Barbara Klutinis has
turned her lens on the
muddled and painful world of Alzheimer’s disease, interviewing
couples affected
by a partner’s diagnosis as they come to terms with their
changing roles.
“As a society we’re terrified of it,” Klutinis
says. Yet as the
population lives longer, the disease grows more common. “It’s
important we
bring it out of the closet.”
Driven by her husband’s diagnosis three years
ago, Klutinis
initially sought to make an experimental film of what she
thought might be
going on in his mind. “I started out with those images,” she
said. When the
couple joined a support group, she realized the film would be
more.
“I felt like I was privy to such intimate
conversations and
processes going on in the group, with people dealing with this
at all different
levels,” she said.
The Sum Total of Our Memory features
interviews with three couples from Klutinis’s support group,
including Noe
Valley real estate manager Joel Panzer and his wife Janet.
Though the film already has a half-dozen
screenings scheduled,
the picture is not complete. Klutinis was urged to interview
medical
professionals to give more information about the disease, and
she is now
enlarging the film.
“Sometimes you think you’re finished and
something happens and
you discover you’re not finished,” said Klutinis, a former
teacher of film
studies at Skyline College and San Francisco State University
whose last work
was Stepping Into the Stream, a documentary
about women fly-fishers.
The 30-minute Sum Total will
be shown three
times during DocFest, the San Francisco documentary film
festival: Saturday,
June 8, at 3 p.m. and Wednesday, June 12, at 7 p.m. at the
Roxie Theater, 3117
16th St., and Sunday, June 9, at 7 p.m. at the Balboa Theatre,
3630 Balboa St.
It will appear in the Legacy Film Festival on
Aging Sunday, June
9, at 1 p.m. (followed by a question-and-answer period) in the
Coppola Auditorium
at San Francisco State University. Finally, it will run daily
July 3 to 7
during the Marin County International Festival of Short Film
and Video on the
Marin County Fairgrounds.
For more information, visit www.thesumtotalmovie.com.
