Wisdom in the Shadows of Dementia

Factual America

In 1999, Rose Tajiri, a second-generation Japanese-American, was diagnosed with dementia. She was 76. Over the following years, as her condition worsened, her daughter, filmmaker Rea Tajiri, became her caregiver.

In Wisdom Gone Wild Rea documents the journey that she and her mother took together, a journey that sees them navigate both the now of life with dementia and the past as Rose recalls memories from her early years, including the time she spent in an internment camp during the Second World War.

The result is, as Matthew Sherwood describes it, a film that is ‘tender, bittersweet, [and] poignant’. Rea calls the film a ‘cinematic poem’, which follows the lines of her mother’s thought process, her ‘dream logic’.

As Rea makes clear, caring for her mother brought highs and lows, sometimes in unexpected places; Rose’s condition brought danger, but also the opportunity to explore, to find meaning. Most of all, it brought wisdom, not just in one area, but several: beauty, beauty in art, and in spiritual matters among others.

Rea discusses her family’s accepting response to her filming her and her mother’s journey, the influence of her late father – a professional photographer – on this project, and offers advice born of her own experience to anyone who might be in the same situation: surrender, connect, enjoy. Living with dementia can be hard, but also meaningful, and even profound.

Watch the episode at https://factualamerica.com

“It was important to me to centre the film around how [my mother] communicated. I wanted to maybe have the viewer adjust a little bit of how they experience dementia.” – Rea Tajiri