Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Connectivity: Familiar Touch
- Thursday, October 9, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4k digital projection (90 minutes)
- With Sarah Friedland (filmmaker)
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Starring: Kathleen Chalfant, Carolyn Michelle, Smith Andy McQueen, H. Jon Benjamin
Familiar Touch (2024), the debut feature from writer-director Sarah Friedland, is a sensitive coming-of-old-age film inspired by her experiences as a caregiver, choreographer, and dance filmmaker. The story follows Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a retired homemaker and cook, as she transitions into an assisted living facility she had once chosen for herself, but no longer remembers. As the film chronicles Ruth’s adjustment to her new surroundings with the support of care workers Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith) and Brian (Andy McQueen), Familiar Touch explores aging not as a loss of self, but as a continued unfolding of identity, memory, and desire. Shot almost entirely on location at Pasadena’s Villa Gardens retirement community, the film features real residents as both cast and crew, weaving authenticity into its choreography of quotidian life and care. With a dancer’s eye for movement and intimacy, Friedland crafts a deeply empathetic portrait that resists ageist tropes and centers octogenarian Ruth’s own ever-evolving perspective.
Filmmaker Sarah Friedland joined moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Familiar Touch.
Biographies
Sarah Friedland (filmmaker)
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has been presented in festivals and art spaces including the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Mubi, MoMA, and the Performa19 Biennial. Sarah graduated from Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt. From 2021 to 2022, she was both a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video, and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2023. Her short film trilogy, Movement Exercises, is distributed by Video Data Bank. Sarah has been working in creative aging for the last eight years, as a caregiver to artists with dementia, and as a teaching artist facilitating intergenerational films and workshops for older adults. Familiar Touch is her debut feature film.
Moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Bhaskar Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He has coedited the collections Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), and The Routledge Handbook of Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020). He has also coedited four journal dossiers/special issues: “The Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies (2005); “Indian Documentary Studies,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies (2012); “The Global-Popular,” Cultural Critique (2021); and “India, Perchance: National Life in the Wake of the Pandemic,” Periscope/Social Text Online (2023). Currently, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and working on two other book-length projects: one about piratical practices in the Global South, and the other about queer underground club cultures in millennial Los Angeles.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Connectivity
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.