We are excited that, owing to additional continuation funding from UK Research and Innovation for SAACY, we have been able to engage Lifelong Films Ltd for the production of a SAACY research-based feature film! Coming of Age has just wrapped after two weeks of filming on location in London – and here’s the exclusive feature that Deadline ran last Friday about this exciting project that brings together creative industries, third-sector organisations and the academy. The related King’s news story can be found here.
Co-written by filmmaker Josh Appignanesi and his longtime collaborator Devorah Baum, Coming of Age follows a couple navigating love, parenthood, midlife and care for ageing parents. Exploring ageing as a lifelong process, as living in time, Coming of Age seeks to counter narratives that situate ageing as happening at the end of life and exclusively tied to notions of decline, disease and loss.
Coming of Age is central to SAACY’s drive to shift how we view ageing, as articulated in our policy report on ageing and the creative industries. The feature film integrates SAACY research. In addition, some interviewees consented to their interview data being shared (in an anonymised version) with Josh. This data helped create fictionalised characters represented on screen, coalescing transcripts from individuals to achieve dramatisation.
Alongside our work with older volunteers, our partnership with major UK charities seeks to encourage nuanced conversation and support research on the experience of ageing before we are ‘old’. Partner charities include Age UK, Brixton Windmill, Centre for Ageing Better, Flourishing Lives, Impact Initiatives Brighton and Hove, InCommon, Re-engage, The Pam Britton Trust for Dementia in Warwickshire, United for All Ages, and Warwick District Faiths Forum. All along, our partners and volunteers have been involved in offering feedback on the film script and are engaging in creating materials for a discussion guide that will become available once the film is released. Most of all, these partnerships seek to synergise efforts to achieve attitudinal change to ageing with far-reaching implications, for example, for how we care, how we retire, and how we think about intergenerational relationships.
Over the last few weeks, I have been privileged to follow work behind the scenes, including with costume design, makeup and production as well as on set. It is exciting to see the commitment, dedication, enthusiasm and energy that goes into a project that seeks to help people rethink ageing. Watch this space for further updates.
Web banner: Still from Coming of Age. (Image: Rob Baker Ashton)