Everybody’s Oma, the most powerful gift of love

This filmmaker’s doco about his mother’s slide into dementia is both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Oma, in her mid-80s and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, moves into the family’s home on the NSW central coast.

Everybody’s Oma (PG)
In cinemas
★★★★

The Australian documentary Everybody’s Oma centres on a filmmaker, Jason van Genderen, and his young family dealing with his mother’s slide into dementia.

It is a 90-minute movie full of bravery, beauty and sadness. It’s common to say a movie “asks a question”. This one does not need to. The answer, the truth, is simply there, for everybody to see. Many viewers will have experienced it themselves.

Hendrika van Genderen is the Oma — Dutch for grandmother — of the title. She is a sparkling woman. Always well-dressed, always smiling, always seeing beauty in the world around her and the people in it. A small example: early on, she and her grandchildren marvel over a frog that lives in the backyard.

It is not due to her, initially, that her son Jason, a director of short films, decides to start filming his family, often on his iPhone. He and wife Megan have a clutch of young kids.

It is because his father, John, is told he has terminal cancer. This is more than a decade ago. He appears only briefly in this documentary. Asked about the diagnosis, he says, “You just have to accept it. There’s no use moaning about it, feeling sorry for yourself.”

It is after his death that the real story of this love-and-life-affirming film begins. Oma, in her mid-80s and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, moves into the family’s home on the NSW central coast.

Her arrival coincides with Covid lockdowns. The family decides to recreate Oma’s daily life inside the house. When they set up a Coles supermarket in the kitchen, film what happens and put it on social media, it goes viral. Ditto when they create a digital version of Sea Life, the aquarium at Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

People from all over the world love what they see. The videos, posted on Facebook, receive more than 100 million hits. The family is interviewed on television in Australia and the US, by no less than James Corden on The Late Late Show.

“Your memory is starting to slip away,’’ the director tells his mother. “So I do all these little videos so we don’t forget all the beautiful things about you.”

His wife Megan, responding to the worldwide online admiration, adds, “We don’t care for Oma because we want to be told we’re amazing. We care for Oma because we love her.”

They are not alone. The Dementia Australia website says 1.6 million Australians are caring for someone with dementia. Unless there is a medical breakthrough, the number of Australians with dementia is forecast to rise from almost 500,000 now to 1.1 million by 2058.

The director had three rules when it came to deciding what to film and share with the world: was it filmed with love, would it raise awareness about dementia and would his mother, if fully cognitive, consent to it.

I admit I had conflicted feelings about the third rule as I started watching. If my 80-year-old mother had dementia (which thankfully she does not), she would not want her life put on social media. We are more private people.

However, that is just a personal view, not a criticism of van Genderen. “I turned my camera onto my family,’’ he says at the outset, “and I was obsessed about capturing every up, every down.”

And when the downs come – inevitably and relentlessly – this story moves to a far sadder place; one that many viewers will relate to.

Oma is still well-dressed, still smiling, still full of love, but she is also falling down regularly, forgetting what she used to remember, confusing her son with her husband.

There is a poignant moment when she tells her son she’s been looking for her husband but can’t find him. Has he gone out for a while?

“He’s been dead for nine years, sweetie,” her son says. He then takes her to a bedside photograph of John, so she can see his face and speak to him. And when Oma wanders from bed and falls, she tells her son, “I wanted to go to my mother. Funny, hey?”

Only a heart of stone would not feel for Oma, her son and his family. The pressure on their work, the marriage, the family life is tremendous.

“We can’t just stop everything and sit with her 24/7,’’ Megan says at one point. Her husband speaks candidly about seeing his mother asleep in bed — there is a monitoring camera in her room — and wondering if a permanent sleep would be for the best.

It is at this point that the hearts of stone that angrily throb online turn on Jason. The social media backlash he receives does not deserve the oxygen of inclusion here, but was savage enough to see him suspend the Facebook page.

Oma died in February, aged 89. Her memory — and her son’s quest to raise awareness about the terrible toll of dementia — continues at www.everbodysoma.com and on the Facebook page Omas Applesauce (it was an essential item in her pantry).

This is a heartwarming, heartbreaking film that everyone should watch. “Love used well,’’ the director says near the end, “is the most powerful gift we have.”

Read our feature on Jason and his Oma: Everybody's Oma: Therapeutic diary of a mother's Alzheimer's journey goes viral

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Bosch & Rockit (MA15+)
In cinemas from August 18, with advance screenings on August 13-16.
madmanfilms.com.au/bosch-and-rockit
★★★

The star of the Australian coming-of-age drama Bosch & Rockit is newcomer Rasmus King, a professional surfer who was 16 when the film was made in his home town of Byron Bay.

He is Rockit, a long-haired teen who is more comfortable on the waves than in the classroom. He brings a naturalness to the role that is impressive for someone so new to the game.

He loves his messed-up father (Luke Hemsworth), known as Bosch, whose estranged wife Elizabeth (Leeanna Walsman) tells their son that Bosch is shorthand for bullshit artist, but then she is a bit of a mess herself.

Bosch makes his living by growing marijuana in northern NSW. He has a young local detective (Michael Sheasby) in on the action.

It’s the late 1980s and the music fits the time. There’s a lot of Dragon (April Sun in Cuba, Are You Old Enough), though David Bowie aptly chimes in with Rebel Rebel.

It’s when an older detective (a potent Martin Sacks) decides not only to join the Bosch business but expand the product line with Colombian cocaine that everything goes south.

“We’re farmers, mate,” Bosch tells the young detective, who he has known most of his life. “We don’t sell coke.”

Rasmus King and Luke Hemsworth in Bosch & Rockit

That soon becomes a moot point. A bush fire brings authorities to the dope fields. Bosch flees but loses his grip, literally, on the bag of coke. A ceiling fan whirrs as it flies upwards.

Bosch tells his son it’s time for a holiday. They pack their surfboards, head to Byron Bay and book into a beach motel, paying with lightly powdered cash.

Handsome, no-good dad meets attractive beach photographer Deb (Isabel Lucas). Rockit meets Ash (newcomer Savannah La Rain) and there’s the prospect of young love. Yet the cops are not far behind. “Half the force is looking for him,” the older detective tells his offsider. “We need to get to him before they do.”

This 106-minute movie is the directorial debut of actor Tyler Atkins, who co-wrote the script, based loosely on his own time growing up in northern NSW.

The director’s acting credits include the 2012 television miniseries Puberty Blues and on one level this film is a love letter to the surf and its surrounds. The shots of Bosch and Rockit surfing are impressive (cinematographer Ben Nott).

On a deeper level, this is a bittersweet story about a young man growing to realise his parents are badly flawed. Initially he thinks it must be his fault.

This is where the film is at its most powerful, with the debutant King at its volatile, fragile centre as the child-parent bond is stretched to breaking point.

This movie has some sentimental padding and a few postcard moments (dolphins surfing, whales breaching), but it’s a solid directorial debut.

The end credits are worth watching, partly to note that there are even more Hemsworths (two of the star’s daughters have small roles), but mainly for the director’s thank you note, which starts with God and then moves on to quite a broad church.