The Brief

Maddy Snell is preparing to swim the English Channel. Thirty-four kilometres of cold, indifferent water. No wetsuit. No shortcuts. In memory of her Nan, Ellen, lost to dementia before she was truly gone. This is a film about grief made active. About a disease that takes the person before it takes the life. About the particular loneliness of watching someone you love disappear while they are still in the room. And about what you do when the love has nowhere left to go. Maddy puts hers in the water. She trains before dawn, alone, in pools and dams and open ocean, carrying something that no training plan accounts for. Her grandfather Bernie sits at home with his photographs and his tea, the still centre of everything the film is reaching toward. Between these two people, one in motion and one in stillness, we find the shape of a love that dementia could not fully take. For Her was made as a pro bono project, a film to help Maddy raise funds for Dementia Australia, and to give voice to the millions of families living inside the same quiet loss. It is a story about one woman and one swim. But it is also about every family who has ever sat across from someone they love and felt the distance growing.