Nobody wants to be a dementia caregiver when they grow up. That is the opening line of Kitty Norton's documentary, and it is the truest sentence in the film. A former NBC assistant editor, Kitty left her career in Los Angeles to return to Portland and care for her mother Gloria, who was living with vascular dementia. What followed was five years of love, exhaustion, grief, dark humor, and a blog called Stumped Town Dementia that resonated with caregivers around the world. Then Kitty did something nobody expected: she borrowed a van, named it The Gloria, hired a film crew, drove 7,500 miles through 27 states in 26 days, and went looking for her people. Wine, Women and Dementia is the film that came out of that road trip, a hilariously heartbreaking documentary featuring Rosanne Corcoran, Ashley Douglass, Grace Douglass, Lexie Fields, Lindsay and Matthew Perrin, Allyson Schrier, and others who have all walked the same impossible road. Featured in Glamour and Entertainment Weekly, broadcast on PBS, and a standing ovation at its Care Colloquium premiere, this is one of the most human films made about aging in years.

Why This Film Matters: More than 11 million Americans provide unpaid care for someone with Alzheimer's or dementia, and the overwhelming majority of them are women. They give up careers, savings, sleep, and often their own health, and the system they are embedded in treats them as an afterthought. Wine, Women and Dementia does something the healthcare industry and most policy conversations refuse to do: it centers the caregiver, not just the patient, and does it without sentimentality or despair. The financial devastation of dementia care, the physical toll of sleeplessness and constant vigilance, the isolation that comes from a role most people cannot imagine until it happens to them, all of it is in this film, wrapped in genuine humor and community. For a generation that is beginning to watch their own parents age, this is not a comfortable film. It is a necessary one.