Alive Inside

Filmmaker Rossato-Bennett follows around MSW Dan Cohen, founder of Music & Memory, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of life for dementia patients via personal digital music devices, and engages experts in neuroscience (Oliver Sacks, for one, and geriatric psychologists) and music (such as Bobby McFerrin and Ugandan Samite Mulando) to articulate the close connection music has to an individual's sense of self. When the withdrawn, memory impaired, or mentally ill people featured in this film are reconnected to their musical memories, other remembrance is triggered and evidence of an "aliveness" emerges that astonishes long-term caregivers and family members. Technically, the production is well edited and uses archival film and a sound track with original music effectively. It won the audience award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and bits of it "went viral" on the Internet when teenagers, reminded of their own grandparents, got hold of a segment and started sharing it. The film motivates people to useful action.