Aesthetics & Therapeia

Abstract

Several years ago, an experimental study coordinated by the psychogeriatrician Giancarlo Savorani[i] and carried out at the public residential care facility ASP Giovanni XXIII of Bologna showed promising improvements in a selected group of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The patients were “administered” so-called memofilms: carefully edited short films, each about ten minutes long, relating in different ways to the patients’ own biographical past—family life, work, leisure—drawn mostly from home video recordings collected over the years. These were interspersed with newly produced sequences, created specifically for the project, featuring places, objects, and above all people—especially their closest caregivers—with whom the patients had a particular familiarity.