Director Renée Brack
Score 6/6
After losing her artist-father to Alzheimer’s, journalist Renée Brack confronts her own fears by undergoing medical experiments as a human lab rat, risking her career & dignity to find out if she too has early signs of the disease. While on this precarious journey with devastating revelations, she discovers wonderful ways to stay connected to people we love living with dementia.
When I decided to watch Ticketyboo I was a little surprised when I realised that this was about Dementia. I was immediately struck by how beautiful and heartfelt the opening to Ticketyboo was and it was great to see that the overall feeling of watching Ticketyboo didn’t come across as if I was watching a confronting lecture about dementia. Taking a combative tone would have been a great failure for this documentary especially considering its dealing with such an important health issue as living with dementia and Brack should be congratulated for tackling in such a loving way. Even though I’m not familiar with Renée Brack’s work there was something familiar to the way she did her voice overs throughout the documentary, it reminded me of some of things that I have seen on the ABC. There were interesting interviews with Ita Buttrose, ABC journalist Anne Conolly, Rick Morton and Tim England. I thought that Tim’s point about point of view and dementia was very interesting and was made all the more meaningful when Renée visited the aged care village. I will admit that the line describing what a Royal Commissions is for the Government actually caused me to chuckle. It was interesting seeing all the testing for Dementia that Renée went through for the Documentary (bonus points for going through the spinal Tap). Seeing what was involved for the testing for Dementia and explaining what dementia is was the most important thing that happened in the documentary because demystifying a health issue like dementia which is the second leading cause of death of Australians. Hopefully Ticketyboo will pave the way for more conversations like the one had in the documentary which are needed for more health issues.