When director Peter Entell’s father was 75, he sent his son a letter suggesting he should make a film about old people. “It’s fun to be old” was one possible title his father suggested. Entell took his father at his word. The documentary he made, premiering in the Burning Lights competition at Visions Du Reel, doesn’t portray old age in quite the way the father first anticipated.
Entell lives in Switzerland. His father was in the US. The director would return to the States every year for his father’s birthday. All the siblings would come together for a family reunion. Entell would always have his camera.
“As the years passed, I could see that things were slowly changing. My father would say, ‘actually, Peter, getting old stinks.’ I could see evidence of this. I could see him slowing down. I could see his health failing, I could see him losing his memory…”
Entell is well known for his films on social, political and environment issues, for example Moving On: The Hunger for Land in Zimbabwe or Shake The Devil Off (about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina). From time to time, though, he makes more personal and intimate films. In Getting Old Stinks he challenged himself “to go deep…there is something I have come to understand, the more you go deep into a subject, perhaps you have a chance for it to be universal. In fact, if you look for what is most uncomfortable, most painful or shameful, in fact in what you most least want to share, is probably where the most potential is of it actually touching other people and reaching their own stories.”
The director filmed his father over a period of 15 years, up until the moment he was dying, in his early 90s.
After his father’s death, Entell left the footage to “sit in the closet” for another 15 years. But then, when he turned 67 (the age his father had been when he had had a heart attack) he decided to revisit it and finally to complete the documentary. There followed three years of editing, from 2019 to early 2022.
Watching the footage again was both “a joyful and painful” experience. There was something uncanny about seeing his loved ones not in a photo album but living and moving, smiling or with tears in their eyes. He would be dealing with very painful moments but, at the same time, he was trying to get the cut right: to ensure the sound was at the right level or that the timing was correct. His professional instincts would kick in and he’d be able to distance himself from the turbulent emotions the material elicited.
The director would show friends and colleagues footage from the documentary as it progressed. He would ask them to be brutally honest.
Getting Old Stinks isn’t only about Entell’s father. It’s as much about the director’s mother, who had died many years before.
“My mother died young – it was an accident, a hospital mistake. She didn’t have the chance to grow old. She died from one day to the next. My father, he died an old man. He reflected on it [death]. He took notes. He collected poems on getting old and dying. He talked very openly about this with all his children” Entell reflects. “Here, you have very different approaches to getting old, to death itself.”
As a boy, the filmmaker had been deeply shocked by his mother’s death. He had felt then a mix of anger and guilt which he hadn’t had the tools to process. “I was a young boy. I had no idea that anger and denial and guilt are classic stages that people go through when they lose a loved one.” When he was 40, he had written a story about the death of his mother. An editor who had read that story encouraged him to include her more prominently in the film.
In the documentary, Entell addresses his mother directly. No, he doesn’t believe in the afterlife. “Nonetheless, I am speaking to her. It feels right to address this to her.”
Getting Old Stinks is full of moments that any close-knit family will recognise. Alongside the birthdays and celebrations, it deals with uncomfortable incidents in the family’s past. The father comes across on screen as charming, kind and optimistic but there are reminiscences about a period many years before when he behaved very aggressively towards his son.
The father later apologised to the son for his actions and the son accepted the apology.
“My father is not unlike probably every other human being who is filled with huge contradictions,” the sons muses. “He was a gentle man. At the same time, when push came to shove, he had lost his job, there were money problems, there was a lot of pressure. This was the period when he reacted.”
What is more evident throughout the documentary, though, is the father’s good nature and resilience.
“We are also a joyous family,” Entell states categorically. At gatherings, relatives will repeat the same jokes year after year. Their delight in each other’s company is self-evident. Even at the bleakest moments, they will turn to humour. The film is thus both poignant and uplifting.
Getting Old Stinks will be released in Switzerland by local distributor, Louise va au cinéma. After its world premiere this week in Nyon, it will also now begin its international festival journey.
