Screened at the opening session of the festival “Triste Para Sempre” in Lisbon, in December 2024, the film “Alma Anciana” (ancient soul) tells the intertwined stories of three elderly groups whose vastly different family ties and trajectories paint a profound picture about care, vulnerability and resilience.
Set in Porto (Portugal), Vienna (Austria) and Havana (Cuba), the documentary directed by Helen Esther Aschauer and Fábio Mota employs an observational technique which enhances the proximity of the viewer to the film’s subjects and lively dilemmas. As an overall theme, all the people shown are affected by a vulnerability related to the advanced age – however, and that is the merit of “Alma Anciana”, they vary according to social class, cultural values and political context, which enriches the search for the “soul” from the title: is there an essence, a pure definition of the experience of an ancient individual?

The Portuguese segment opens the film with the delicate condition of bedridden Lucília, who is completely dependent on the personal care provided by her daughters. A jump leads to the Ukrainian couple Viktor and Ludmila, sheltered by their family members in Vienna. Finally, Mirna takes care of her sister Damaris in a precarious house in Cuba. The candid moments that are captured by the filmmakers in the three cities encapsulate a common tension concerning the old age affected by disabilities and health deterioration: who, from the family, will take responsibility to take care of their own? In the case of Lucília, her elderly daughters clean her, feed her, devoting their time and attention in such a way that that becomes a full time job for these women. Whereas Viktor and Ludmila are active and independent, their lives have been turned upside down following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in their exile. Their remembrance comes in the form of stories and songs from their homeland, but also by watching the horrific videos about the war. At some point, their relatives bring up the subject of taking them to a nursing home, which is objected by Ludmila: “what kind of freedom” would she have at an aged care facility? The way she pictures the aging phenomenon as something completely different than what she experiences is not without reason. Ludmila is talking, after all, about the independence and autonomy which base the very definition of our human condition, as seen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. This is, nonetheless, subjected to social and cultural vectors that might deem someone incapable or dependent. Would Ludmila be incapable of thinking what is best for her, or in fact the family dynamics ought to be solely responsible for deciding her destiny? What the film discusses, by alternating between the three stories, is that this concept of freedom is definitely not universal and exposes everyone’s frailty in face of the aging condition.

Mirna, in one of the most touching scenes, reveals that she has never been happy, in her whole life. Dealing with her own fragile health and yet determined to take care of Damaris, who is only 5 years her senior, this heroic woman just goes by the days and expects no compassion from the world.
It is the case of Lucília, more specifically, her segment brings to the surface a tricky situation. Suffering from the severe effects of dementia, she cannot articulate language in the same way that she used to. When private VHS images invite us to the past, we are compelled to give back the humanity that we do not seem to recognize in the incapacitated woman. That being said, the documentary engages with the discussion about freedom by walking on thin ice: by exposing extremely intimate moments of Lucília and picturing her affliction and disorientation through close-ups, would not the film have crossed an important line? If Lucília has no say over the image-making of herself, the only way to legitimize the portrait of her vulnerability is via the family’s authorization – which goes back again to how these (sometimes inevitable) ties define how one lives, exists, how they are seen, perceived and understood in the world.
In that sense, “Alma Anciana” embraces this meta discussion about the freedom of elderly people, and takes responsibility for offering a crude and hard watch, believing that that is a path to heal and empathize with the elderly and their family members. In any case, as a valid search for subjectivities and transcendent moments together with the elderly in Porto, Vienna and Havana, the directors did manage to personify important disparities witnessed across the globe. It is worth asking if the exercise of freedom at a later age is a shared concern in today’s society, or if the mere exemplarity encountered in different households has become at most an afterthought about the inexorability of growing older.
OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
Eduardo Prado Cardoso (26 de Dezembro de 2024). What Kind of Freedom? Reflections about Vulnerabilities and Family Ties at a Later Age. Desenvolvimento Humano Integral. Recuperado em 9 de Fevereiro de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/12zuy