Alive Inside - Festival Vocallis
Stirring documentary about a social worker fighting a broken healthcare system to demonstrate music’s ability to combat memory loss.
An aging population undeniably leads to an increasing number of people with memory issues. In the United States alone, millions of elderly people now face dementia. Often, their loved ones are forced to look on, powerless, as the degenerative process evolves. Music, however, can recover treasures buried in the pasts of these patients and bring them back to the surface.
In ALIVE INSIDE, winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at Sundance, filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett spends three years in the company of social worker Dan Cohen, who shows him several touching examples of this happening. The impressive results of Cohen’s experiments are discussed in interviews with experts, including neurologist Oliver Sacks and musician Bobby McFerrin. Yet, INSIDE ALIVE mostly aims, just like music itself, at the viewer’s heart.