A LEAF FALLS TO THE SKY

37 minutes. Directed by Didde Elnif and Anders Birch. Edited by Kasper Birch. Produced by Alphaville Pictures. Premiered at the CPH:DOX Film Festival, 2012. Robert-nominated as Best Short Documentary, 2012.

– ‘I could no longer bear seeing my father incarcerated in a hamster cage at the dementia ward of a nursing home. Visiting him day after day with my 2-year-old daughter without him being able to remember us. To have to tell him every time, who he was, and where he was, and that mother had died, and that I was his son and had become married and had a child. At each visit, it was as if someone had hit the reset button and we started all over again.’ This is how the author Knud Romer describes the last period with his demented father. A protracted farewell, which is only really completed, when Knud Romer in collaboration with the composer Bent Sørensen and DR’s girl choir performs the work ‘A Leaf Falls to the Sky’ in the Tivoli Concert Hall as a farewell to his father. In the documentary film of the same name, we follow the making of the concert from the last conversations between Knud Romer and his father at the nursing home, his death at the hospital, the clearing of his childhood home in Nykøbing Falster, and the concert at Tivoli. The film ‘A Leaf Falls to the Sky’ is about universal questions: dying, growing up, being the next generation that one day will die.