FLORE / Flore, route de la Mer

West Coast Premiere  • Documentary • France, 2013

DCP • 1.85 • Digital • Color • 95 min

 

Directed and written by: Jean-Albert Lièvre

Cinematography by: Jean-Albert Lièvre

Film Editing by: Cécile Husson

Produced by: Jean-Albert Lièvre

U.S. Distributor: Distrib Films

U.S. Release: October 2014

 

In this inspiring and intensely personal documentary, filmmaker Jean-Albert Lièvre confronts his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. At first, Flore is placed in secure, prison-like facilities and medicated to a state of near-stupor. Watching her condition steadily decline, Lièvre, heartbroken and desperate, takes Flore out of the institution in a wheelchair and installs her in a house in Corsica. There, surrounded by the sea, the sun and the wind, and no longer medicated, she begins to walk, smile and even paint again. Chronicling Flore’s life over three years, he learns that the debilitating condition is not something you die with, it’s something you live with. What began with a cell phone camera recording the negative effects of drugs, became a touching film about hope, about recovering dignity, and ultimately, about a son’s gratitude.

 

Always ready for adventure, writer/director Jean-Albert Lièvre founded a film pre-production and location scouting company in 1982 before moving to Japan where he organized news and commercial shoots. His globetrotting ways continued through the nineties, making wildlife documentaries for the Ushuaia television series. His growing environmental awareness led him to co-direct and co-write, with Nicolas Hulot, The Titanic Syndrome (2009), a disturbing documentary comparing the earth to the legendary doomed vessel. Lièvre’s latest adventure was much closer to home, dedicating all his energies to his mother during her battle with Alzheimer’s.