(Sept. 19) – “Alzheimer’s is a disease that clears memory, identity and memories of a lifetime. To understand what it means you should get into the head of a patient, you should assist who suffers from this disease and spend days, months, years with him. His illness becomes yours”. It is hard to speak about a slow and painful disease. It is also difficult to deal with Alzheimer’s patients: a sense of inadequacy, helplessness, fear, anxiety. But Mara Consoli, author, director and screenwriter, succeeded in that thanks to her documentary “Vittorio, Capitan Pistone … e tutti gli altri”. A world so far as real as the disease affects about 5% of people over 60 years and in Italy there are approximately 500 thousand patients. “Vittorio, Capitan Pistone … e tutti gli altri” has already been applauded at the London Independent Film Festival. It has also been appreciated at the Biografilm of Bologna as well as the Salento International Film Festival. But now it is ready for a new journey: on September 23 the documentary by Mara Consoli will be presented in Colorado at the BolderLIfe Festival and in mid-October it will be screened in Washington, at the Utopia Film Festival. In the movie, Consoli traces the profile of Victor, “a person without qualities or flaws” but that “has something in common with Ronald Reagan, Rita Hayworth, Winston Churchill, Charles Bronson, Annie Girardot and another 20 million people.” Vittorio, in fact, was suffering from Alzheimer’s and this documentary is a travelogue of what happens in his head. “My father had already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I started to film the moments spent together,” Mara Consoli explains on his blog. “So I decided to turn a private thing into a documentary because, during his illness, the hardest thing was to collect information on how to help him. With the experience and common sense, our family found some solutions that I wanted to share through the documentary. ” “During his my father began to surround himself with ‘imaginary friends’. Among those there was Capitan Pistone. My father appealed to him whenever he was in trouble or felt ‘in danger’. I confess – concludes Mara Consoli – that me too and all my family addressed to Capitan Pistone”. (Gil/Peg)
