River Lethe Short Film

We are raising funds to be able to produce our student short film River Lethe, which follows Letha as she battles the grief of her grandmother's worsening dementia. The funds raised will be used to secure locations, equipment, props, etc to ensure the quality of the film. They will also be used to provide hot meals and transportation for the cast and crew.

Director's statement:

"The Greek Myth of the River Lethe maintains that the person who drinks from the river will have their memories washed away. The water cleanses the mind from the person’s past. I find that storytelling, as a concept, is at the very core of who we are as humans. We tell stories so that as our own memories passes with the stream of the river, the legacy of our loved ones, the people’s who’s stories we share, continues to live on when we no longer do. We create a snapshot of our relationships to remember the love, the life and the grief when our own memories fade away. As Toni Morrison brilliantly put it: ‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’.

When I was in my early teens, I watched Chris Coloumbus’ film I Kill Giants (2017), which to this day, is one of the films that left the biggest impression on me. The monsters, and imaginary worlds our brains create to process grief is something I have always found incredibly beautiful and interesting. How we don’t quite want to let go of our past, nor others’ pasts, so we create stories to commemorate our friends, family and loved ones instead. We fight these creatures in our minds to accept the loss. To turn the pain into gratitude. To embrace the beauty of the relationship we had, and the love that lives on after our time together has passed. Unaware of how to process our own grief, we sculpt this perfect little capsule through storytelling that, no matter how grand, will never feel quite enough or fully representative. But that will ensure that once our own memory fades, the legacy of the people we love live on.

Writing this story started as a way to process the grief of watching my own grandmother’s developing dementia. I wanted to write something about watching your loved one slowly lose their memories, and the focus was not to write about my own personal experience. I wanted to write a story about a family member watching the alzheimer’s slowly worsen; battling the grief of what is lost while still being grateful for the time they have left. The nuanced inbetween of watching certain aspects of their relationship slowly fade, while the person is still alive and you find other beautiful moments as life goes on. As I was writing it, however, I felt the story drift much more towards the love and bond between a granddaughter and her grandmother than the actual disease. It became a film about two best friends, and the time they spent together. While dementia is still deeply integrated in the story, the core of this film became the unconditional love between the two women. Reading it now, it’s clear to me that it became about my own personal story; not the more distanced, bystand approach I had initially intended. This film is for the greatest grandmother imaginable, and the time I was blessed to spend with her." - Alice Fransson