Michael Chanan offers a comprehensive and insightful survey of cinematic depictions of dementia. The work is global in scope, marrying theory with history, while also touchingly treating dementia as a phenomenon that has personally affected the author. A landmark text.

William Brown, Associate Professor of Film, University of British Columbia, Canada

Dementia presents large challenges of representation: first, every person with dementia is a unique individual. Secondly, cinema risks focusing on symptomatic and observable behaviours rather than on lived experience. Michael Chanan's book shows us how, and how far, the vast range of films he has watched have managed to understand and engage with these problems. His analysis is as eloquent as it is thorough. Highly recommended.

Lesley Saunders, Poet and Author

Dementia on Screen is that rare work of film scholarship which dares to think with feeling. Chanan's unflinching account of his brother's Alzheimer's anchors a truly global survey - from Haneke to Iran, from Chilean memory politics to Yakutian neorealism - while mounting a quietly devastating critique of the biomedical model and the political failures it conceals. Essential reading for anyone interested in cinema, care, or what it means to remain human in the face of disappearance.

Agnieszka Piotrowska, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, award-winning filmmaker, and author of The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics (2026)