Last year, Paul Romero Mendez brought his short film “Ruth” to the Rome International Film Festival (RIFF). The film follows a woman named Ruth (Ania Marson) who, struggling with dementia, becomes lost in her own home.
This year, Mendez is looking at dementia from another perspective. His short film “While It Lasts” played at this year’s film festival over the weekend. The movie, written by Katie Sheridan, is about a daughter (Sheridan) whose mother (Tracey Wilkinson) is suffering from early onset dementia. The daughter tries to connect with her mother through the power of music.
“‘Ruth’ looked at what it was like for the person with dementia – how scary it can be when the house around you changes, people disappear,” Mendez said. “This time around, it was how difficult it is for the family members and how tragic it can be for them, but also how music can help with that.”
Coming out of “Ruth,” Mendez didn’t intend to make another movie about the same heavy subject. But when Sheridan brought him the script, he couldn’t say no.
“When I read that script, I thought this is beautiful and there’s so much to it with music and memory,” he said. “It felt like a nice thing to explore.”
Mendez said Sheridan was a game collaborator, willing to make adjustments to the script as necessary during filming if something didn’t feel quite right on the day.
“[It was great] having the writer there, giving their thoughts and giving their ideas,” Mendez said. “But then, she’s so professional as an actress that she knows exactly when it’s time for her to be performing.
When it came to casting Sheridan’s counterpart, Wilkinson, Mendez said she brought out the character’s musicality in a way he didn’t expect.
“You can tell that she’s very musical, that she’s trying to remember things by her fingers trying to find notes,” Mendez said. “This is really unique, she’s brought something to the character that we haven’t thought about.”
Music is pivotal in “While It Lasts,” serving as the thing that’s able to pull the mother character back into herself and help her recognize her daughter. To come up with the piece that would hold that power, Mendez employed Christian Lloyd, who has worked with him on numerous other projects.
“The music for this was so important,” Mendez said. “We needed it to feel like a piece that mum had composed. But also the end of the film adapts it and turns it into a score.”
Mendez has directed a number of music videos in the past, but he said that when it comes to putting into words how music should evoke feeling, he is “musically illiterate.” But Lloyd was able to take Mendez’s long, wordy descriptions and create something beautiful.
“He wrote such a beautiful piece,” he said. “It plucks every heartstring.”
For some of the shoot, Mendez was able to shoot in an actual nursing home, which provided real-life inspirations for the actors and the crew. The sense of loneliness that exists in a place like that seeped into the fabric of the film.
“The staff there are so well trained, and they do such an amazing job,” Mendez said. “But you can’t help but feel that these people are in this home, and until their family comes to visit, it’s quite a lonely place to be, even though the staff keep them all motivated and happy.”
This is the second time that Mendez, who resides in the United Kingdom, has attended RIFF. He said that one of the reasons he loves RIFF is the overwhelming sense of community and support for indie filmmaking that resonates through the town.
“The whole community comes together,” he said. “You stay for all the events, you meet all the people.”
Mendez also said he liked the fact that RIFF focuses on work that otherwise might not be as well seen, such as independent films and short films. He talked about how difficult it can be to make a short film and create a satisfying middle, beginning, and end in such a short amount of time. And, once you finish a short film, there’s the small matter of convincing people to actually watch it.
“There’s so much content out there that people are overwhelmed by options,” he said. “Which is a little bit sad, because amazing movies, amazing short films, are lost in a sea of what I call content.”
