Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Eat Your Catfish / Film School Radio interview with Co-directors Noah Amir Arjomand & Adam Isenberg (Senem Tüzen)
In this deeply personal documentary EAT YOUR CATFISH we meet the matriarch of the Arjomand family, Kathryn, now dependent on round-the-clock care, due to a harrowing diagnosis. She clings to a mordant wit while yearning to witness her daughter's wedding. Co-directors and producers Adam Isenberg, Senem Tüzen and Noah Amir Arjomand — who is Kathryn's son — deliver a brutally frank and darkly humorous portrait of a family teetering on the brink, grappling with the daily demands of disability and in-home caregiving. With her daughter Minou’s wedding day approaching, Kathryn is determined to live to see her child get married. Years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, have left Kathryn paralyzed and needing 24-hour care. She relies on an eye-tracking, speech-generating computer to impart her wishes, but it can be an uphill struggle to be ‘heard’. With her mind intact and having opted for mechanical breathing, she could live like this indefinitely. EAT YOUR CATFISH is draws on 930 hours of footage – all filmed without any crew present from a fixed camera and narrated by Kathryn. The result is a profoundly intimate, layered and wryly funny portrait of a family at its breaking point. Co-directors Noah Amir Arjomand & Adam Isenberg (Senem Tüzen) joins us to talk about the ways this film project came about, why they adopted the POV approach to telling the story and how seeing the world from the point-of-view Kathryn could positively impact other family’s dealing with a loved one in a comparable medical condition. For more go to: eatyourcatfish.com For more on the POV screening: pbs.org/pov/eatyourcatfish