How We Are Now
2014 · 33m · UK
Directed by Andrea Niada
Genres: biography, documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Peter, a retired actor, lives with Douglas, his partner of sixty years, both now in their eighties. As Douglas approaches his 83rd birthday, the couple — along with friends and helpers — offer an intimate view of how old age has reshaped their daily life, their roles within the relationship, and the way they think about the future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is formally restrained to the point of invisibility, which is probably the point—but that's also precisely why most people will find it boring, and why it's actually kind of radical.
Niada's refusal to mythologize or sentimentalize sixty years of partnership—treating it instead as a lived domestic practice—is a quiet but definitive formal statement about what documentary intimacy should look like; the measured pacing and observational framing sit squarely in the lineage of cinema verité's most rigorous practitioners.
The decision to let long stretches of daily routine—dressing, moving through space, the logistics of care—breathe without editorial commentary is what makes the emotional stakes land; it's a restraint that costs nothing and means everything.
Reviews
An emotionally satisfying film... intellectually satisfying and beautifully constructed.
Old age is a phase in life that fascinates me... this philosophical aspect of old age is very rarely tackled in documentary.
Festivals
- Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival
- New Orleans Film Festival
- London International Documentary Film Festival
- American Documentary Film Festival
- NFFTY (National Film Festival for Talented Youth) 2016