Max Lugavere

I started college on a pre-med track and then I ended up pivoting to documentary filmmaking because I just love the immediacy of documentary filmmaking.

And I've always been really interested in...

You know, life is fleeting.

Like we, especially prior to the, I mean, you know, advent of, I'm going to sound like a dinosaur for saying this, but like iPhones and, you know, really high quality cameras that fit in your pocket.

Like we didn't have the ways that we now might take for granted to immortalize life's precious fleeting moments, you know?

So in college, this dawned on me as something like really important to me.

as a way to immortalize and pay homage to these moments that would otherwise just pass by like water under a bridge.

And when my mom became sick, I intuitively just felt like as an artist, one really meaningful way for me to transmute this pain, this thing that was unfolding in my life that was so incredibly painful and turn it into something meaningful.

was to turn on a camera and to document it, to document what my mom was going through, what I was going through.

And at the same time, I was resourceful enough to recognize that by doing this, by saying that I was working on a documentary, it would allow me access to some of these researchers and scientists whose work I was reading once I started going down this rabbit hole because, you know, like...

As anybody who's ever been sick or who has had a sick loved one knows, you get precious few moments in that physician's office, especially these days in the health insurance model.

It's like almost an assembly line.

You're lucky if you get 15 minutes.

And those 15 minutes are colored often by fear and by frustration.

And you don't always get to ask the questions that you intended on asking in that doctor's visit, right?

So for me, because the most important person in my life I was seeing descend further every day, further and further down this neurodegenerative abyss, I basically decided to exploit this documentary project for my mom's benefit and for my family's benefit.

to then use it as a calling card to go and sit with these researchers whose work that I was reading and ask them up close and personal, why did my mom develop this condition?

Why is anybody developing this condition?

It took 10 years to finalize, but yeah, little empty boxes is the fruit of that process.

And it's something that I no longer have my mom.