First Cousin Once Removed
October. 09,2012Filmmaker Alan Berliner documents his first cousin, the poet-translator Edwin Honig, as he succumbs to Alzheimer's.
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Reviews
You won't be disappointed!
Wonderful character development!
Highly Overrated But Still Good
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Talented and off-beat film-maker Alan Berliner documents the mind of his much older first cousin, the poet and translator Edwin Homing, as he slowly loses the battle against Alzheimer's.Of course, any film about that subject can't help but be touching, but Berliner goes well beyond the obvious tragedy to raise questions of; what is memory, time, family? We see and hear both the good and bad about this man, hear (and sometimes see) his poetry, hear the anger he put on his children as they were growing up, to end of not with a portrait of a disease victim, but of a man and an artist. Berliner jumps around in time, so we see Edwin in bad and good moments. In the end, this isn't a linear portrait of a man's decline, but an thoughtful and even darkly entertaining exploration of what is communication, thought, love.