Attended a screening over the weekend at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley of a film made about Mary Fielding House – a fantastic residential home for older people where the standard of accommodation and gardens and treatment is par excellence.

They had a film-maker with them for months. The film was very well shot and showed very sensitively some of the issues that face older people – the agonising slowness to walk down a corridor with a walking frame – made poignant by the stillness of the camera just waiting.

But the film really centred on three residents of immense age and their lives and thoughts. In many ways it was far more about them than Mary Fielding itself – and I am not sure that was the original intent. That having been said – the lives of these three women were incredible. Political activists and peace campaigners whose mind and opinions were strong and inspirational.

One other aspect which came across very strongly was from a conversation by two of the staff there who were telling the interviewer that something like 98% (I didn’t take notes at the time, so forgive me if that number isn’t quite correct) often said things like ‘they wanted to go to sleep’ and they had ‘had enough’. It was very moving – but just like my summer project when I visited so many local residential homes for the elderly – what you really come away with is the ability to stop seeing ‘old people’ and you see people – with real lives and real history and phenomenal experience of life.