Synopsis
"What Remains" explores my relationship with my mother as Alzheimer’s takes hold. Using my childhood dollhouse, home movies, audio recordings and the letters we exchanged over decades, the film uncovers what persists in the face of memory loss: music, love, connection and resilience.
Director's statement
I began filming "What Remains" while staying with my parents in France, shortly after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Alone in my childhood bedroom and facing my old dollhouse, it occurred to me that I hadn’t looked inside for a long time. I took the front panel off.
The rooms were in shambles, broken wooden chairs, fallen curtains, dust piling up on the floors. It became clear to me that the dollhouse was a mirror of our lives, a reflection of the disruption brought by my mother’s illness to our home.
As I started to fix the dollhouse, the sound of my mother playing the piano drifted up from downstairs. Her music, familiar and joyful, reminded me that even as memory fades, the essential endures. This tension became the heart of the film. And the dollhouse became a stage where the past and the present try to coalesce seamlessly.
Too often, dementia is told as a story of disappearance. "What Remains" challenges that narrative and reframes Alzheimer’s not as an ending, but as a shifting mode of being, one where music, love, connection, and resilience take priority.
Credits
A Juliette Pictures production
France, United States | 12 minutes
Written, directed and edited by: Anne Checler
Letters written by: Irene Checler
Letters read by: Gabrielle Glaser
Camera: Cullen Golden and Anne Checler
Sound Mixing: Doug Johnson
Color Correcting and Finishing: Cullen Golden
Music by: Mark Lingard and Duke Ellington
Special thanks to:
Rainer, Amalia and Elyas Brueckheimer
Laurence and Jonathan Checler
Marie Desgranges, Sandrine Isambert, Kristen Nutile
Director's Bio
Anne Checler is a French-American filmmaker and Emmy® nominated editor with over 20 years of experience crafting acclaimed documentaries. Her work has been featured on PBS’ Independent Lens and American Experience, NBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Criterion Channel, France 2, and has screened at numerous film festivals.
Recent credits include the PBS series "Citizen Nation," winner of "Best Episodic Series" at the International Documentary Association Awards and nominated for an Emmy® Award for Outstanding Editing,
"Facing Eviction" (Frontline), "Generations Stolen" (Webby Award winner), "Extremism in America" (Online Journalism Award winner), and "Bearing the Burden: Black Mothers in America" (The New Yorker).
Building on her career as an editor, Anne expanded into directing with "Goodnight Irene," an audio documentary about her mother’s upbringing during the McCarthy era, which was featured at the “Listen Up Brooklyn” podcast festival and at the New Media Film Festival.
With "What Remains," she continues to pursue intimate, personal storytelling that resonates with broader social themes.
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