NINETY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Irene Lowes is feisty, funny – and she has a temper on her. But she is also growing increasingly frail and confused as Alzheimer's disease tightens its grip on her brain. Sometimes she phones her married daughter Roberta at all hours, paranoia causing them both sleepless nights and stressful days. She forgets things – such as the fact that you can't put metal in the microwave.
This is the woman we meet in the documentary made by Lowes's 30-year-old granddaughter, Lindsay Goodall. It may not be the cosy stuff of home movies, but she has turned her family's daily dramas into a touching, revealing documentary – all the more m
oving since Irene died in February, just days before her 93rd birthday, never having seen the film that has won a major prize and is now eligible for entry to the Academy Awards. "I am just fascinated by people," says Goodall, explaining her passion for documentary-making. "I'm a people-watcher, endlessly curious."
Now based in Glasgow, she is originally from Glenrothes, Fife, where her family still lives, and where the film Irene was shot as part of a scheme for the Scottish Documentary Institute. "Every year they have a theme and that year the theme was 'home'," says Goodall.
"As soon as I saw that, I immediately thought of my grandmother, because it was a constant topic of conversation in our family: whether she should be going into a home; if she would even go into one; would she be better off there or would she be better living in her own home?"
Lowes moved to Glenrothes when Goodall was 11, after the death of her husband. "We used to go down to Yorkshire every summer, and when she moved up she took me to horse-riding lessons, she gave me lifts everywhere, when mum and dad went on holiday I went to stay with her, and she looked after our dog every day, so she was always there."
Around four years ago, Lowes started forgetting things – where she had put her handbag or her walking stick; what she had done with the TV remote. The decline was gradual at first, but then she had a fall and her health went rapidly downhill. "Mum is an only child and so she stopped working and ended up going to see my gran three times a day. She did all her shopping, all her washing, all her cleaning. She fed her. But there were other things: my gran would phone up in the middle of the night thinking it was daytime and wondering why no-one had seen her; she would think people were after her; she would get paranoid. She occasionally had falls and the neighbours would phone up, so my mum was constantly on call. When the phone rang at a strange time, it was like, 'That'll be gran, what's happened?'
Irene Lowes
"The more she forgot, the more my mum would compensate; so she would turn up earlier in the evening to catch my gran before she started to make her own food. The bad side of that is my gran became more dependent on my mum, so eventually she forgot that she ever could cook."
Goodall saw the call for entries to the film scheme the day before the deadline, so sent in her proposal without talking to her mother about it. "I spoke to my mum later and she said, 'No, I don't think so. I don't want to be on camera, I don't think your gran would want to be filmed.' So I was thinking I probably wouldn't be shortlisted anyway. Then I was and I thought, 'That's good... Oh no, I have to tell my mum.' She kind of rolled her eyes and said, 'Oh God', but she was really supportive."
Goodall initially tried filming using a cameraman, but Lowes couldn't get used to it. "My gran spent the whole time asking, 'Who's he? What's he doing? Does he want tea? Does he want cake?'"
So in the end she did the filming herself, capturing some candid moments of sometimes brutal honesty. "In the film my mum did shout at my gran. We had some stressful moments because my gran had a temper on her and she was quite determined. I was really worried about how she would be portrayed; I didn't want my gran to come across as a victim and I didn't want my mum to look like a bully, because that wasn't how it was; if anything it was the other way around.
"That was something I had to think about constantly because I can't just show the film and walk away. I have to sit down to Christmas dinner with my mum."
Roberta even asked her daughter to cut out the part where she was shouting at her mother but was persuaded to let it stay in. "She trusted me," says Goodall.
As to any moral questions about filming someone without their consent, she says, "Every time my gran saw the camera she would ask, 'What are you doing?' And I would tell her I was making a film about the family. She was never told that she had Alzheimer's so I never said that's what the film was about.
"But there were a couple of times when she said, 'Turn that thing off' – for instance, during an argument with my mum, which made me really happy because it meant I wasn't exploiting her; she had control over the situation."
Irene went on to win the Jury Prize at the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival this month and Best Documentary at the Palm Springs International Shortfest in June, making it eligible for entry to the Academy Awards. "Since we won at Palm Springs we've had calls from so many other festivals to submit," says Goodall. "This month and next we're showing in Canada, Barcelona, Bristol and Croatia. It has been non-stop."
And what about reactions closer to home? "Mum really liked it. I didn't show her the film before it was finished. I took it over to Fife and we sat and watched it together – she was quite anxious to see it – and she was really happy."
Goodall herself watched the film again recently and admits to shedding a tear or two in the cinema. "There is a bit where my gran manages to string a sentence together. She's going into a home – she's only away for a week – but she said to me, 'Why do I have to go? I'm quite happy where I am. Nobody hurts me, I can look after myself.' It's quite a long sentence and it just struck me that a month or two after that she couldn't speak in sentences; she couldn't have put her point across. How frustrating it must be to have these thoughts in your head but you can't voice them."
To view Irene, see www.4docs.org.uk. Visit
www.alzscot.org for information about Alzheimer's
This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009