Oct 6, 2019 at 7:30 pm
Tomorrow Never Knows
with Adam Sekuler
Program
Tomorrow Never Knows
93 min, 2019
“TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS is one of the greatest films about death I’ve seen—it’s a triumph of empathy, a tour de force of emotion, and, perhaps even more monumentally, a prime example of cinema as ontological examination.” – Cinefile
The uncomfortable reality of death is faced by Shar and Cynthia who, upon Shar’s diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer’s, make a brave and difficult decision: she will undertake a conscious death, fully experiencing the end of her life. This documentary moves away from any ominous, taboo or frightening depiction, instead raising the question of what we really mean when we say someone has gone. Is it the senility, the last breath or the burial? How do we prepare for each stage? And what happens when the diagnosis comes soon after your decision to start a gender transition? As our population ages and the number of diagnoses of this little-understood disease increases, these are questions we must find the cultural courage to address. This is a quiet, non-linear and thought-provoking piece that encourages and rewards the honest examination of our own mortality.
Winner of the Radical Empathy Award at Chicago Underground Film Fest 2018
Nominated for a 2019 Queerty award for Best Documentary
93 min
ADAM SEKULER is a filmmaker, curator, educator and programmer based in New Orleans. Screening in forums and film festivals throughout the US and internationally, his many alternative films strike a delicate balance between stylization and naturalism, creating a poetic and lyrical form of visual storytelling. These include MY LIFE IN GOOGLE, a personal memoir landscape film and live performance, TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS, an evocative feature-length work-in-progress about choosing how and when to die with Alzheimer’s disease, and WORK IN PROGRESS, an observational look at labor and its various choreographies.
SUZANNE O’BRIEN is an RN and End of Life Doula Program Developer and Trainer and has been serving people with serious illness and the dying since 2003 and educating healthcare professionals and the public since 2008.
Suzanne is a founding member and former vice president of (NEDA) National End of Life Doula Alliance. Suzanne has trained professional End of Life Doulas in 8 Countries and has given her Level 1 End of Life Doula Training for families and communities to thousands of people worldwide. Suzanne presently offers live monthly free End of Life Doula Trainings live in NYC and online. She is the author of the best-selling book Creating Positive Passings: End of Life Doula Level 1 Caregiver Training and the highly rated podcast “Ask a Death Doula.”
In 2017, Suzanne founded The International Doulagivers Foundation (INDGF) to help bring end-of-life education to families and communities that otherwise could not get access to this information. So far, the INDGF has donated training sessions to organizations in Belize, Thailand, South Africa, and the Philippines.
In 2019, Suzanne co-founded “World Training Day” where she donates her Doulagivers Level 1 End of Life Doula Family Training for people to give all over the world on the same day every year in hopes to help everyone everywhere have the support they need to care for their loved ones at the end of life.
Suzanne has been featured in The New York Times, the Huffington Post, the New York Post, and Hospice Times, PBS Television, and on CBS News.