Latest news with #documentary
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
A woman was told she had Alzheimer's 13 years ago. Now she's walking the width of the U.S. after reversing her illness
Judy Benjamin was only 67 when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the devastating disease her mother and several uncles all suffered from. The symptoms started slowly; a forgotten phone number, trouble reading the newspaper. But Benjamin soon found reason to panic after a brain scan showed damage and amyloid plaque build-up — hallmarks of Alzheimer's, the progressive neurodegenerative disorder that typically affects memory, thinking, and behavior. Now 81, Benjamin is in the midst of an epic cross-country walk to prove to herself, and others, that reversal of Alzheimer's symptoms is possible thanks to a specific, science-backed protocol — and she's living proof. Having started her journey April 5 in San Diego, her hopes to make it to Saint Augustine, Florida, by October 5. She's being accompanied by a support team, and a film crew shooting footage for a documentary. This week she celebrated hitting 1,000 miles. 'I've been really thrilled with the people I've met along the way,' Benjamin told The Independent . 'Everyone knows someone with Alzheimer's and they're very interested in my story because I reversed my cognitive decline by radically changing my life.' Getting to this point took a series of small steps and big ones as Benjamin navigated her diagnosis. Her symptoms started shortly after her own mother died of the disease 20 years after her initial diagnosis. "I was working overseas and started to get really worried because I couldn't remember things — even my own phone number or locker combination," she recalled to Fox News Digital. "I got lost driving, when I'm always really good about direction." Scans of Benjamin's brain showed lots of amyloid plaque — proteins that, when built up on the brain, can result in nerve cell death — and damage to the right and left parietal areas of her brain. Located behind the brain's frontal lobe, the parietal lobe helps with location awareness and processes your sense of touch, according to the Cleveland Clinic. "I knew that it was going downhill really quickly, and I was extremely depressed and distressed about that,' she said. In an attempt to chart a new path forward, Benjamin met with Dr. Dale Bredesen at a friend's urging. Bredesen, an internationally recognized expert in the mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases and the Chief Science Officer of Apollo Health, had been developing a protocol to reverse the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's but had yet to test it on a patient. He's long been a believer that Alzheimer's isn't just preventable — it's reversible, too. So, Benjamin seeking treatment at the time Bredesen was looking for a 'patient zero' was kismet. Brededsen recalled Benjamin taking 'copious notes' during her first appointment due to her poor memory. He had Benjamin follow his ReCODE (for 'reversal of cognitive decline') protocol, which included changes to Benjamin's diet and exercise routine, as well as making adjustments to her sleep habits and starting meditation. As Bredesen explained to The Independent about ReCODE: 'The bottom line is that it is a personalized, precision medicine protocol that addresses the drivers specific to each person (so it is based on each person's lab results), and these drivers are in three major groups —energetics (blood flow, oxygenation, etc.), inflammation (from any of many different causes), and toxicity (inorganics, organics, and biotoxins) — and three lesser groups — trophic support (hormones, nutrients, and growth factors), neurotransmitters (such as acetylcholine, which is needed for memory), and stress.' Bredesen noted, too, that despite published documentation of the ways in which cognitive decline can be reversed, the vast majority of people remain unaware that it is often possible. Treatment is also more likely to be effective if started early on. He's documented his research in several books, including The End of Alzheimer's and The Ageless Brain. Together, the pair have worked to maintain her progress. She's become a brain health coach and a yoga instructor, and, as Bredesen described her, 'a survivor of cognitive decline, and a remarkable role model for anyone interested in healthy aging.' 'Very very few people are capable of walking 3000 miles, from coast to coast. But to have someone doing it who is 81 years old, and has reversed her cognitive decline after a diagnosis of early Alzheimer's in 2012, is truly historic,' Bredesen told The Independent. 'She is doing something that I could not do, nor could most of the people I know. She is truly an inspiration.' Still, Benjamin's message is simple — offering the hope that cognitive decline can be prevented and reversed. 'That is really the purpose of my journey,' she told The Independent. 'And also to show that you can be 81 years old and walk all this way one step at a time.'
Geek Tyrant
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Trailer For The SLICE OF LIFE a Delightful Doc at the Unexpected Afterlife of Old Pizza Hut Buildings — GeekTyrant
There's something oddly comforting about seeing an old Pizza Hut building, even if it's no longer serving personal pan pizzas. I have memories as a kid going to Pizza Hut restaurants to eat dinner with the family. Slice of Life , a new documentary from Brooklyn filmmakers Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, takes that strange nostalgia and turns it into something surprisingly meaningful. They crisscrossed the country visiting former Pizza Hut buildings now reborn as a karaoke bar in Texas, a cannabis dispensary in rural Colorado, and a LGBTQ+ church in Florida, These places, once symbols of mid-century American chain-restaurant charm, now reflect the evolving communities that inhabit them. As the filmmakers put it: 'A contemporary portrait of America, observed within the walls of former Pizza Hut buildings across the country.' Slice of Life also draws a line back to the brand's humble beginnings, weaving in the story of the Carney brothers, who launched Pizza Hut in Wichita, Kansas, back in 1958. The film smartly positions these transformed locations as mirrors of modern America, each new use layered over memories of childhood birthday parties, jukebox songs, and endless breadsticks. 'These nostalgic spaces hold memories of a bygone era,' the filmmakers explain, 'but through the power of transformation, they provide something new and special for the communities that continue to flow through them.' It's an unexpectedly heartfelt reminder that even the most ordinary buildings can live extraordinary second lives.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Brighton pupil, 16, wins national film award
A Brighton pupil has won a national film award for her documentary on her family's emigration from Tehran, following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, to the UK. Rosie won the Best Documentary category in the 2025 Into Film Awards, a charity that celebrates young people's creativity. The 16-year-old said her documentary, Freedom of the Sea, was a "personal project" as it explored challenges her family encountered when adapting to a culturally, socially and linguistically different country. "This award means a lot to me because it was my the first film and it's great to be recognised by Into Film. I'm grateful to have had this opportunity," she said. "While I was making the film, I learnt in more detail about the joys, as well as challenges, my family left behind in Iran." Rosie said the documentary featured her family's journey to a country where they could enjoy freedom while still cherishing the memories of the home they once held dear. "Growing up I don't think I had ever truly appreciated what my family had been through," she said. Rosie added the documentary had a strong focus on the sea. "My family being able to swim in the sea together is a perfect encapsulation of the freedom they found in the UK," she explained. "This film highlights the rights and liberties we take for granted, and how something as simple as swimming in the sea at my local beach is a huge privilege." The awards ceremony, which took place on Tuesday, included celebrity presenters such as Hugh Grant, Olivia Cooke, Andy Serkis, James Norton, Geri Halliwell-Horner and Archie Madekwe. Actress Rose Ayling-Ellis said she was "honoured" to be the host of the 2025 Into Film Awards. "I am so impressed with the creativity and brilliance of all the young people involved," she said. "The standard of the nominated films is extraordinarily high and just shows how important it is to give young people a voice through filmmaking." Fiona Evans, chief executive of Into Film, added: "These awards are a celebration of young people's talent. "The UK film industry values, nurtures and believes in the voices of the next generation." Follow BBC Sussex on Facebook, on X, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@ or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250. Animated film featuring youth choir up for Oscar
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It was very hard to see myself as a director': the Australian film-maker changing the documentary genre
'There are so many hang-ups in the documentary world about this idea of ultimate truth,' says Gabrielle Brady. 'There's only subjectivity in documentary. It's all a construction.' Ever since Louis Lumière filmed workers leaving his factory in 1895, documentary film has struggled with the idea of authenticity. Lumière's 17-metre film is regarded as the first ever made, yet even this modest document is a lie: it was filmed not on a work day, but a Sunday. Ethnographer Robert Flaherty staged scenes in his 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, and it was Michael Moore's crafty editing that made Roger and Me an emotive box office hit. Brady's 2018 breakthrough film Island of the Hungry Ghosts, and her latest, The Wolves Always Come at Night, invite audiences, festival programmers, critics, funding bodies and peers to contend with what is, for many, still a new format: the hybrid documentary. 'I only use that word, hybrid, to signify an in-between space,' Brady says. 'It doesn't tell you how it was made. It just lets you know that it's not entirely documentary, or that the film-maker may have used some fictional tools, which most documentaries have.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning To create her films, Brady works with the subjects to tell their story. Island of the Hungry Ghosts was shot on Christmas Island where Brady entwined spiritual ceremonies; the millennia-old migration cycle of the island's famous crabs; and the daily life of Poh Lin Lee, a counseller working with asylum seekers being held in indefinite detention. The film, which failed to get funding in Australia, won 14 different prizes at festivals around the world, including the grand jury prize at Sundance. The film's release drew attention to the risks faced by its subject, who spoke publicly despite laws at the time prohibiting health workers in offshore detention from doing so. For Brady, this was just one of many ethical complexities the project demanded. 'Ordinarily, protagonists don't get any creative input,' she says. 'If they're not being paid and if it's just their story for the sake of everyone else, that doesn't seem a fair exchange. I like to think of people you're working with more as team members, creative collaborators. I'm really big on people getting paid. Not for their story or to say a certain thing, but for their time.' Brady's new film, The Wolves Always Come at Night, follows a young couple, Davaa and Zaya, and their four children, living in the steppes of Mongolia. We get to know them through their connection with their animals and knowledge of the land, lovingly rendered by Brady in bright, dynamic and warmly intimate scenes. After a devastating dust storm, the family are forced to give up their livelihoods and move to the outskirts of the city, a sprawling shantytown known as the ger district. Many of the film's biggest themes – climate change, displacement, economic precarity, the end of a millennia-deep connection to land and animals – haunt the most powerful scenes but go unspoken. Naturalistic conversations take place between the family, scenes that feel inseparable from the story around them. In one particularly intimate moment, Davaa and Zaya lie in bed and contemplate their future. Davaa begins to cry before Zaya quietly scolds him, 'Don't cry in bed.' As Brady explains, moments like this were created collaboratively with the cast and crew. 'For that scene, Davaa and I discussed how the audience can understand the grief he is carrying. I had witnessed that a few times, the burden that he carried; the way he would discuss it was incredibly potent and just laden with this weight. I'd had this idea: what if you were to meet an older herder in the ger district and have this conversation? He said, 'That would never happen. It has to be with Zaya and the kids can't be there. It has to be dark, and it has to be quiet. This is [the only way] I would go to those places,'' she says. 'Then we created that environment with no expectation of what would unfold.' Brady's connection to Mongolia began when she was a teenager. Growing up in the New South Wales Blue Mountains west of Sydney, she studied theatre media in Bathurst with aspirations of becoming an actor. After working as a producer on Sunrise and The Morning Show, Brady joined a volunteer program and spent a year in Mongolia where she produced and co-hosted a children's television program, Voice Box, designed to help people learn English. Mentioning the show brings forth a burst of laughter. 'Oh my god, it was so wonderfully cheesy. We'd travel around, interview kids – like the school chess champion – and live with nomadic families. A lot of what was shown on TV then was imported from Russia or China, so the idea was to make something that was English, learning about Mongolian kids. Everything was handmade. It really looked like a 70s Australian TV set.' Once back in Australia, Brady chased that feeling to Yuendumu, a community in remote Northern Territory, where she helped other film-makers make their films. It was there she realised she wanted to become a director. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 'The longer I stayed in Australia, the more I was being pushed to become a producer,' she says. 'But I wanted to be a director, and [as a woman] it was very hard to see myself as one … I wasn't being held back, I [just] didn't feel there was any opportunity. A lot of my favourite films were from Europe and South America, and I wanted to learn a different way of seeing the world, so I went and studied film in Cuba.' In Cuba, Brady studied at Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión, a regional film-making school with no internet connection, where students are banned from using a camera for the first year of their three-year course. There, in a state of culture shock, Brady began again. 'I burned everything I knew to the ground,' she says, 'and rebuilt a vision for how I wanted to make films.' To graduate, she had to travel around the country, interviewing locals and collecting their stories. 'The study itself blurred the lines between documentary and fiction,' Brady says – a practice she took into her own films. 'Both Ghosts and Wolves asked for this way of storytelling – to not create suffering for people to be inside of what they're going through, but instead create a bit of distance. I'm authoring the vision; they're authoring my story.' The seed for the story of her latest film was planted five years ago. On her return visits to Mongolia to see friends, Brady found that some had been forced to leave the countryside and move to the city. When she mentioned this to her friend, producer Ariunaa Tserenpil, Tserenpil said it was the sort of story local film-makers would never tell. 'In Mongolia, we are so connected to nature and our animals, but we are not looking into each other because we are shy,' Tserenpil says. 'We feel more comfortable with nature, and we don't talk about our grief. Outside of the city, each family lives a very long distance from each other, and we do not have a sense of community because nomads are very independent people. But Gab put these people at the centre. This intimacy is very beautiful.' Brady was 'tentative and hesitant' about telling the story. 'There's a long legacy of foreign film-makers coming in and making a certain type of film in Mongolia particularly. But the idea grew on me,' she says. 'We're seeing two polarities. In one extreme, there's this really extractionist way of film-making that's very exploitative. But on the other side you end up saying, 'Can you only make a film from the town you're in?' 'Can you only make a film about a woman if you're a woman?' So, no. Let's make something in between. An insider-outsider film and see if we can find a new dialogue in that way of storytelling as well.' While Brady's work has earned widespread acclaim, it remains an anomaly in the documentary world. When she began making films in the 2010s, the ecosystem was at its critical and commercial zenith, with lauded film-makers including Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney and Errol Morris. Around the end of the decade came the rise of the streaming services and an insatiable demand for cheaply made nonfiction storytelling: formulaic true-crime exposés, sports films and celebrity profiles made with the approval of their participants. Documentaries that reach cinemas and awards circuits often centre on urgent modern catastrophes – the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza. Both trends make Brady's work even more unusual. 'The documentary world is topical by nature, and those are the films that might get awards,' says Brady. 'I see documentaries as much an art form as fiction, but I don't think other people do.' The Wolves Always Come at Night is in Australian cinemas from 3 July. In the UK, it is streaming on BBC iPlayer
BBC News
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Brighton pupil, 16, wins best documentary at national film award
A Brighton pupil has won a national film award for her documentary on her family's emigration from Tehran, following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, to the won the Best Documentary category in the 2025 Into Film Awards, a charity that celebrates young people's 16-year-old said her documentary, Freedom of the Sea, was a "personal project" as it explored challenges her family encountered when adapting to a culturally, socially and linguistically different country. "This award means a lot to me because it was my the first film and it's great to be recognised by Into Film. I'm grateful to have had this opportunity," she said. 'Freedom of the sea' "While I was making the film, I learnt in more detail about the joys, as well as challenges, my family left behind in Iran."Rosie said the documentary featured her family's journey to a country where they could enjoy freedom while still cherishing the memories of the home they once held dear."Growing up I don't think I had ever truly appreciated what my family had been through," she added the documentary had a strong focus on the sea."My family being able to swim in the sea together is a perfect encapsulation of the freedom they found in the UK," she explained."This film highlights the rights and liberties we take for granted, and how something as simple as swimming in the sea at my local beach is a huge privilege." The awards ceremony, which took place on Tuesday, included celebrity presenters such as Hugh Grant, Olivia Cooke, Andy Serkis, James Norton, Geri Halliwell-Horner and Archie Madekwe. Actress Rose Ayling-Ellis said she was "honoured" to be the host of the 2025 Into Film Awards."I am so impressed with the creativity and brilliance of all the young people involved," she said."The standard of the nominated films is extraordinarily high and just shows how important it is to give young people a voice through filmmaking."Fiona Evans, chief executive of Into Film, added: "These awards are a celebration of young people's talent. "The UK film industry values, nurtures and believes in the voices of the next generation."
