Mimi and Dona

Mimi and Dona is a personal documentary about my aunt and grandmother. It is also a love story. I set out to make it when it appeared that my 92-year-old grandmother, Mimi, could no longer care for her daughter, my 64-year-old aunt Dona, who was diagnosed with an intellectual disability as a child and had lived at home her entire life.

In the months leading up to Dona’s move to a state-run institution in Texas, I filmed Mimi and Dona’s sweet and quirky life together. I also interviewed my mother and my brother, who voiced the ambivalence we were all feeling. Was this the right thing for Dona? Would Mimi fall apart without her?

Whenever I told people about Mimi and Dona's situation, they would chime in that they knew someone in a similar predicament—a cousin, a neighbor or a friend's sibling, some with developmental disabilities, others with mental illnesses, all struggling to find appropriate care and housing for a loved one. This was an untold story happening all around us, with caregivers like my grandmother facing agonizing decisions, often with little support or guidance.

Now that Mimi and Dona is finished, I believe we are on the cusp of a crisis with our aging population of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. A recent article in the LA Jewish Journal states, "Those very parents who refused to go along with the advice of their own physicians to institutionalize their children in the 1950s now find themselves in their sunset years with little help on how to ensure a good future for their adult child with developmental disabilities." This situation plays out in heartbreaking fashion in Mimi and Dona, making the film a potentially powerful tool in the ongoing dialogue about this issue.