An Extraordinary Documentary Portrait of a Playwright Facing Alzheimer’s Disease

#TIA – It’s hard to outdo the artistry behind this documentary portrait of a playwright facing alzeimers with no holds barred

“Artist-portrait documentaries have become art-house staples, because they have a ready-made fan base, but also because many filmmakers, like many artists, have an inherent inclination to ponder artists’ lives and to lend their aesthetic enthusiasms an enduring form. Most of these films are as much about the filmmaker as about the subject—yet most of them have an arm’s-length, encyclopedia-like impersonality. There’s no danger of impersonality in “The Rest I Make Up,” Michelle Memran’s documentary portrait of the playwright María Irene Fornés (which screens August 23rd through the 29th, at MOMA). It’s very much a four-handed film, made (as the credits say) both by Memran and by Fornés, and it’s explicitly, inescapably about their collaboration. The resulting film is a profound, tragic, yet joyful vision of art. It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.”

Read more at The New Yorker