Walk With Me

Bluesky

A deeply personal film, a labour of love, Walk With Me is a powerful examination of the impacts of Alzheimers on individuals and their relationships. It's an affirming reminder that art can help us as individuals and communities to make sense, to take stock, to identify the things that matter. That it's such a personal story makes it an opportunity to reflect on the universality of its experiences. To live, to love, to lose, to grieve.

There's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson but I was reminded in part of Vonnegut's observations about what makes life worth living. The little things abound and in an act of psychocartography we get the chance to watch a couple map out their new territories of being and seeing. Heidi Levitt who writes, directs, has a background in film, specifically casting. That experience behind the scenes has undoubtedly helped wrangle a complicated bit of film-making. There are dozens of credited camera and sound staff, above and beyond the complexities of wrangling production for something this personal. The pandemic has an impact too, with videoconferencing adding to the various mediums.

Mediums and not media, though they are mixed too. Levitt's husband, Charlie Hess, himself involved in the creative arts. An art director for, amongst others, UCLA's house magazine, one of the recurring themes is how creativity and composition are affected by his condition. That's his, inevitably, but also those around him. The discussion of map-making is part of learning how to navigate the condition, to forge new paths while exploring what amounts to a new self.

There's discussion of acceptance, of faith, of Vermont as the best medicine. The focus on that which matters extends to the film, we see Heidi and Charlie and their children learning to work within and around their changing circumstances. There are plenty of experts too, on the neurobiology, on the psychosociological, but similarly recurrent is the sense of knowing oneself, one's loved ones. An accident of scheduling meant that I spent time with my own loved ones shortly after seeing this at 2025's Edinburgh Film Festival, and I recognised the changing nature of relationships with age and illness. On stairs my father might once have carried me up we pause halfway to catch his breath. On the sofa my partner and I swap updates on our dull maladies as we might once have recounted drunken misadventures.

A question asked again, "What do you really need?" To express, to cope, to feel. Walk With Me is an invitation between Charlie and Heidi, from Heidi and Charlie, to travel the road they are travelling as witness, as support. I'd love to purport to a jaded cynicism and excuse the emotions with which I sometimes greet (at) films with festival tiredeness, but that's not true. Films are machines for empathy, as Roger Ebert said, and this is a finely engineered one. There are, have been, and will be more films as personal about illness, about families, about the weight of grief, about celebrating while there's time. The very last moment of the film is a small gesture and it's one I'm still thinking about. Walk With Me reaches out, with empathy, for sympathy, and in defiance of apathy, and while heaven forfend that this is a path you or I will have to navigate the steps in this journey are worth following.

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