Synopsis
Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and company was made just after Dying at Grace, King’s poignant portrait of a terminal-care unit and reflects both his recent interest in the end of life and his ongoing passion for making films that closely document peoples’ intimate lives. In Memory for Max, King focuses on Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. He said, “Filming Memory at Baycrest brought back vivid memories of filming Warrendale, a film about emotionally ‘disturbed’ children, which I had made almost four decades ago.” Both films, after all, are about tightly knit communities that are in some ways closed off from the world (Warrendale is set almost entirely inside a residential care facility for such ‘disturbed’ children), and yet both films work hard to show us how much these invisible parts of society illuminate the world at large. The Toronto Film Festival programmer Stacey Donen put the film in just this context of King’s humanist commitments when he wrote, “The inevitable passage of time forms the backdrop against which King expertly documents the need for and, ultimately, the power of companionship, conveying much about what it is to be human.”