Warm and Inspiring, ALMOST HOME Chronicles a Year in the Life of a Milwaukee Nursing Home that is Implementing a Revolutionary New Approach to the Challenge of Making a Nursing Home Feel Like Home

ALMOST HOME is a feature-length, cinema verité documentary chronicling a year in the life of a vibrant and revolutionary retirement community in America's Midwest. It will premiere on the Emmy Award winning PBS series Independent Lens, in January 2006, just as the first wave of baby boomers, born in 1946, turns 60. As the 76 million strong Boomer generation rounds that momentous corner, 50% of Americans will be reckoning with either their own aging or that of a loved one. It's not an easy task for a generation steeped in denial about getting older and frightened by the specter of dependency. We prefer to combat aging with pills, creams, surgery, and humor instead of understanding its realities and planning ahead, and the media only deepens the denial by serving up only images of "positive aging" like 90-year-old parachuters, while shunning images of frailty and dementia.

ALMOST HOME, airing on Independent Lens, hosted by Edie Falco, on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 10 PM (check local listings) rescues real stories of aging -- frightening, tender, funny, surprising and honest -- from an exile of denial.

The stories in ALMOST HOME unfold at Saint John's on the Lake in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a retirement community (independent living, assisted living and nursing home) reinventing its 135-year-old medical model of care (think hospital) into a social one (think home). The visionaries behind this "culture-change" revolution seek to tear down traditional walls between residents, staff, and families and to replace the stigma of nursing homes as institutions of boredom and despair with a vision of "community" where residents have choices and live rich and fulfilling lives. To succeed, they will have to win over skeptical managers, resistant nurses mired in regulations, overworked and underpaid nursing assistants, and complacent residents and families accustomed to being excluded from many of the decisions that affect them.

Told through memorable characters and true-life drama, ALMOST HOME gives viewers an inside and personal look into the lives of many residents, their families and those who care for them. The film follows one couple bonded by their struggle with Alzheimer's and another divided by the challenges of Parkinson's; "sandwich generation" children torn between caring for their parents and caring for their own children and careers; nursing assistants doing crucial but unsavory work for poverty wages while juggling precarious lives at home; healthy seniors who fear the day they may have to move to the dreaded nursing home; and a visionary nursing home director feverishly working to alleviate such fear by transforming his impersonal, regimented, hospital-like institution into a warm "home" that promotes autonomy and inspires independence instead of fear.

Through these personal stories, the film explores several issues that have affected or will affect all our lives including coping with disability and dementia, adapting to how aging changes marriages and other relationships, negotiating caregiving responsibilities, preparing for the end of life, dealing with the economics of nursing home care, and searching for the best possible way to live out our final years. But far from being depressing, ALMOST HOME tells a surprising story that grips you from the start, never flinches from reality, and offers hope where many think there is none.