vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
YOUNG@HEART
Director: Stephen Waker
With: Young @ Heart Chorus
Run Time: 107 minutes
Country: United Kingdom
Year: 2008
Language: English
Rating: G (Coarse language)
Reviews: www.metacritic.com/film/titles/young@heart
A hit among audiences and critics at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and winner of an audience award at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival, Young @ Heart is a humorous and inspiring documentary that challenges the stereotypes of old age in a world obsessed with eternal youth.
For over twenty-five years, the Young @ Heart Chorus has entertained audiences at home and abroad with unique renditions of punk, rock and rhythm-and-blues songs by musicians as varied as Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix and The Clash. Of course, the average age of most rock ‘n’ rollers isn’t eighty years young. As the group prepares for a new show hilariously titled “Alive and Well,” Young @ Heart’s taskmaster and choral director Bob Cilian has a new collection of songs for these lively elders to learn. Far from a novelty act, the group is as much about serious music and supportive community as it is a way to stay active and engaged in a society that often expects seniors to be passive and quiet. The group’s repertoire provides depth to the aging process as “Stayin’ Alive” becomes an amusing meditation on life and death, and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” serves as a haunting ode to lost youth and fallen friends for a group whose membership is delicately said to be “in flux.”
Documenting the unique challenges faced by this impressive collection of senior citizens, Stephen Walker’s intimate and delightfully whimsical documentary demonstrates that the Young @ Heart Chorus only gets better with age. Funny, poignant and inspirational, the film offers the kind of wisdom that can only be cultivated with age, as the elderly protagonists cope with loss and forge on in an ever-changing society.
“A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, this alternately hilarious and heartbreaking movie will send you out of the theater with a new lease on life.” – David Ansen, Newsweek
