Which Drawer Is the Cutlery in?

INSTANT36 is a short film festival competition in which creatives and filmmakers have only 36 hours to conceptualise, plan, film, edit, and submit their short film based on the given theme, this year was:  Vorne ist immer da, wo Verwirrung herrscht (Amidst the chaos, you find clarity).

In this film we explored the subtleties of a mind that slips, disconnects, and forgets; in which moments of clarity actually start to feel like chaos and become frustrating. Dementia turns confusion into anger very quickly, and so we hear the woman mumble things to herself like, “Ugh, he always puts things in the wrong place,” or yelling at the person calling when they ask to speak to someone else.

We decided to explore a topic that was close to all of us in one way or another, taking inspiration from an experience I had where the old woman that used to live in my apartment had become lost during the course of the night and managed to ask my neighbour to call a locksmith to let her back in. Throughout all the confusion and the language barriers and the questioning and the accusations (from the damn locksmith, of all people) I recognised a look on her face, one that I knew from my Gran. It became clear to me that she was struggling with Dementia, and so I looked in her purse, discovering a list of contacts, some of which we called and managed to help her find her way back.