Reuters
source: reuters
Canadian director Leah Nelson says she was inspired by her family’s experience with Alzheimer’s when making “Tangles,” an animated dark comedy that weaves together heartbreak, humor and love even as memory fades.
The hand-drawn, black-and-white animated film is Nelson’s feature debut and an adaptation of Canadian cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s graphic-novel memoir “Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me.” The film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival after its Cannes premiere.
Nelson said in an interview she first came across Leavitt’s memoir about 16 years ago, when dementia was affecting her own family, and the story gave her “permission to laugh” during a difficult period in her life.
Told through the eyes of Leavitt’s character, the film follows her and her family as they struggle to adjust to a new reality. In the film, Leavitt is building a life of her own, with a budding career and a new relationship, when her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis upends her world.
“I got kind of stuck on it. I couldn’t let it go at that point,” Nelson told Reuters. “I was determined to try to turn it into a film and share the kind of cathartic experience that I got from reading the story.”
