This playful, profound, and immensely moving docu-fantasia by Kirsten Johnson is a valentine to the director’s beloved father, Dick Johnson, made as she has begun to face the reality of losing him to dementia. Using the language of cinema both to defy death and to confront it head-on, Johnson mischievously envisions an array of ways in which the man she loves most in the world might die, staging a series of alternately darkly comic and colorfully imaginative tableaux interwoven with raw vérité footage capturing the pair’s tender but increasingly fragile bond. Tackling taboo questions of aging, mortality, and grief with subversive humor and surprising grace, Dick Johnson Is Dead is ultimately a triumphant celebration of life, and of the gentle, funny, unforgettable man at its center. Long live Dick Johnson.
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Supplements
- New audio commentary featuring Kirsten Johnson, cowriter and editor Nels Bangerter, and documentary sound recordist Judy Karp
- New conversation among Kirsten Johnson and her fellow producers Katy Chevigny and Marilyn Ness and coproducer Maureen A. Ryan
- New interview with sound designer Pete Horner
- New program featuring Kirsten Johnson in conversation with fellow filmmakers about redefining what a documentary can be
- Trailer
- English descriptive audio
- An essay by author So Mayer