illustration
Melanie Gilligan, Home Together, 2020-2022, courtesy of Melanie Gilligan and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf.

Home Together (2020-2022) is an episodic video series that focuses on communities of older people who decide to live collectively and look out for one another in their aging years. The film is a docu-fiction drama that looks at the situations of aging people finding ways to fight isolation in a society that marginalizes people who are older and it also looks at other related issues that impact older people. The story begins as we meet Janette Ledwith and learn about the community that she is creating. As the story follows her, we learn about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted older people as well as its other social impacts. We meet Seong-gee Um, a researcher in health equity who is studying how immigrant seniors receive home care and Catherine Doherty, who works in retirement living and long-term care. The fourth person introduced in the film is Theresa, an actor who deals with long-term illness, who brings a fictional element to the story by playing someone who wants to join a co-housing community for older people. Theresa’s character finds herself confronted with the exclusionary, ableist approach that some co-housing communities display when they avoid dealing with people’s health difficulties during older age. The film returns to Janette in 2022 who is in the process of selling the house where she intended to start the co-housing community and she reflects on the challenges of building a collective community of older people in the present moment.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3