THE PATRON SAINTS

The Patron Saints is a disquieting and hyperrealistic glimpse into life at a nursing home. Bound by the candid confessions of a recently disabled resident, the film weaves haunting images, scenes and stories from within the institution walls. Sidestepping conventional documentary methods for a heightened cinematic approach to storytelling, the film employs lyrical realism and black humor in this charged portrait of fading bodies and minds.

72 min / Documentary / 2011 / 1.78

Directed, Produced, Shot & Edited by Brian M. Cassidy & Melanie Shatzky

Additional Editing by Lance Edmands

Sound Design & Mix by Nicholas Sjostrom

Made with the generous support of Cinereach, Chicken & Egg, NYSCA, Rooftop Films and IFP.

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"An extremely potent documentary, one which provokes an emotional response in the spectator without exploiting the subjects, who wouldn’t otherwise exist outside that structure’s walls" -Filmmaker

"Bleak...moving...expressionistic..." -****, NOW Magazine"

"An impressively stylized document of the institutional apparatus of aging and dying” -Cinema Scope

"Portrait of a crowded residential care facility for the elderly and infirm doesn't flinch from the most depressing elements of senility, abandonment and despair...Poetical..." -Variety

"Confront(s) us with the faces of people we work so diligently to forget" -****, The Torontoist

"Unsettling...disquieting...disturbing..." -Indiewire

"...feels like being a spirit drifting between rooms, observing patients awaiting death. It's like Emily Dickinson’s version of Enter the Void." -****, Ioncinema

‎"A series of arresting, impressionistic portraits...thoroughly and affirmingly human..." -BlogTO

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