Up the River with Acid

Open City Documentary Festival 2023

A tender 16mm portrait of the filmmaker Harold Hutter’s elderly mother and father, filmed over the course of 2 days in the small French village where they live. Horst Hutter is a retired university professor now suffering from advanced dementia, his wife Franciney Prévost is a poet whose moving writing accompanies the film.

The couple are filmed in the soft colours of their domestic interior as Horst struggles to remember his daily routine. Some habits seem lifelong, others newly formed by the intrusion of dementia. His memory is fading and his sight and hearing are almost completely lost. Amongst these scenes, recorded conversations between Horst and Franciney gather memories from their lives together and the moment they met and fell in love.

These quotidian moments are observed in long, still compositions as Hutter achieves the kind of intimacy that comes with familial closeness. The resulting film is not just a document of his father’s journey with dementia, but also the love story of his parents.