Crazy Like They Are

In Crazy Like They Are, the American filmmaker Cameron Pearson examines his motives to keep on filming his declining grandmother against her will. He films how his grandma, due to Parkinson's disease, slowly but surely becomes infirm and isolated, and how she starts getting under his mother's and his own skin. The last four years of her life, his grandma lives with her divorced daughter. Pearson constantly keeps filming and adding comment. He alternates the home-video scenes with home-made clips, excerpts from his TV career as an anchorman and old home movies. His own life passes in review, because he suspects that his insensitive way of filming has something to do with his inner discontent. He made the first home video of his grandmother in the winter of 1990, the last one in early 1998. Every time, his grandma asks him to turn off the camera. The filmmaker never listens. He wonders whether he likes to see other people suffer. Then, he realises that the film is about his own pain. Can the act of filming put him in touch with his feelings? (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)