I Wanted To Hear Your Voice

One of the greatest pleasures of watching a movie in a cinema is the moment when a room full of strangers begins to feel the same thing at the same exact time. Regular moviegoers know it does not happen every day, but I experienced it on the September 18, 2026, at Kutaisi International Shorts Film Festival. During the screening of I Wanted To Hear Your Voice, by James Pallerito, the sadness seemed to travel beyond the screen and settle among us, filling every corner of the packed screening room.

In this deeply personal image James Pallerito – Jamie to his mum and, after the first minutes, to all the viewers – opens the door to his daily routine of caring for his mother who suffers from dementia. We meet Marie, at the point in her life when she is fully weakened by the disease and needs Jamie’s full-time care. “Hello, Jamie, it’s me again.” We only hear Marie’s voice through the answering machine. It feels like there are only two of them in this world – at the park, on their photo wall, in the videos of Jamie’s childhood. In those videos, we see a different version of their relationship, one in which Marie was the one caring for her son. Now their roles have reversed, but the relationship has not simply been turned upside down. At first glance, we might think it is Marie who wants to hear her son’s voice. But we quickly come to the conclusion that it is Jamie, who not only wants to, but desperately needs to hear his mum speak again.

The central idea that the body, which once carried and sustained life, eventually becomes unable to hold it, is a recurring theme in cinema. Two valuable references that come to mind from recent years are academy award-winning The Father (2020), by Florian Zeller, and the critically acclaimed Vortex (2021) by Gaspar Noé. As in I Wanted To Hear Your Voice, they confront cognitive and physical decline without offering the comfort of a clear resolution. Their unflinching approach matters, because the reality of living with dementia is rarely fun to watch on a big screen: it is repetitive, undignified, exhausting, and often devastatingly ordinary.

By refusing to look away, these films challenge the impulse to soften suffering for the viewer.  While The Father and Vortex use fictional characters to confront the experience, I Wanted To Hear Your Voice captures the relationship that exists outside the screen. Pallerito films himself and his mother in real time. The staged compositions, deliberate camera placement, and carefully constructed narrative give their reality a cinematic form, placing the film within docufiction.

As we hear the mother’s voicemails showcasing how her dementia gets worse in the span of 12 minutes, we also hear the silent suffering of Jamie. The interesting part is not how he washes her, changes her, or even flosses her teeth one by one. It is how he tries to keep her dignity, even after independence disappears. He makes sure she is wearing her pearl necklace when he takes her out to the park. The necklace becomes a quiet act of resistance against the erasure of identity, and putting it on Marie’s neck turns into a small ritual through which hope is preserved.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to separate caregiving from the emotional contradictions it entails. Jamie’s devotion is moving precisely because it is not presented as a grand gesture but as an accumulation of ordinary responsibilities. At the same time, the film’s attention to Jamie suggests that caregiving is not simply an expression of love. It is also a form of prolonged grief, experienced while the person one loves is still physically present.

“Mother, I love you, do you love me?” Jamie asks, and for the first time, we notice a flicker in Marie’s eyes. As we all sigh and wipe our tears when Jamie tucks her to bed, only one unanswerable question is gnawing at us – is she still there?

Reviewed on: 23 Oct 2026