The Coming of Age

“We’re aging: older adults are the fastest growing age demographic globally and expected to double in size in the US by 2060. And yet our film culture clings to youth. The Coming of Age liberates the genre from the strictures of youth to present an anti-ageist portrait of growing older in global cinema, drawing on my film-viewing research to prepare for the making of my feature debut Familiar Touch. Presenting films from the silent era up through our current moment of seismic demographic shift, The Coming of Age bears the name of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal 1970 feminist book on aging and borrows the genre as a frame for seeing and celebrating older adults in the fullness and complexity of themselves. Highlights include De Sica’s Umberto D., Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, and an experimental shorts program centered on the gestures and daily lives of older adults. What links each film in this series is not aging as a subject, but the aging subject’s perspective, showing old age in the diversity of its experience: as a time for pleasure, poetry, resistance, and even revenge.” —Series curator Sarah Friedland