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We first see Jerry as he’s driving through a tunnel, and we hear bits and pieces of a conversation with his sister. “Isn’t there something that can be arranged for dad?” he asks. “I got my own shit to worry about.”
Rutger van Leeuwen’s short film Jerry is based on a true story, in the sense that there really is a young man out there named Jerry who is taking care of his father with Alzheimer’s. “It’s a hybrid of fact and fiction”, says van Leeuwen, “and it’s also my first short film.”
“We find it incredibly important to nurture projects that are both deeply personal and that contribute to larger social conversations,” says Miguel Teixeira, founder of production house Mr.Frank. “We feel that Jerry is a necessary story to tell at a time in which mental health is finally receiving the attention it deserves.”
Whether he’s driving through a tunnel or running across an open field, we get the sense that Jerry is both moving towards and away from something. In reality, both sensations coexist when our lives are tied to someone else’s, especially as a caregiver, and it’s precisely the coexistence of opposing emotions that stands out the most in this film. You don’t feel either love or sadness, you feel both, and at once.
Credits
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- Production Company Mr Frank
- Director Rutger van Leeuwen
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Credits
View on- Production Company Mr Frank
- Director Rutger van Leeuwen
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Credits
powered by- Production Company Mr Frank
- Director Rutger van Leeuwen
When we commit something to memory, we say that we know it “by heart”. That is to say, we don’t hold our dearest memories in the conscious territory of our thoughts. We store them somewhere more mystifying and profound. When we recognise the notes of a song from long ago, it’s through our senses that we capture the echo of what we already know.
And so Jerry plays his father’s old records, hoping that he will recognise the songs. But it’s only until Jerry takes the old, familiar notes and re-makes them into something else, something that mixes old and new, that we see his father rise up and respond to the music.
“I believe that you always take something with you from your parents,” van Leeuwen says, “and it becomes a part of your personality. In the film, this really comes through with the music, with Jerry making a version of the same music his father listened to, but with his own influences.”
In the film’s context of contrasting and coexisting feelings and roles, the child who takes care of the parent, the parent who comforts the child, Jerry serves as a reminder that moving forward is not necessarily dependent on what we take with us, or what we leave behind. That we can embrace both the familiar and the unfamiliar within one moment, in the same way that we can be certain of who we are even as we see ourselves change.
