Considering What It Means To Die With Dignity: Lorraine Price On Her Short "The Hairdresser"
Lorraine Price is an award-winning writer/Director. Her most recent feature documentary was the final episode of TSN's award-winning series Engraved On A Nation titled On The Line was nominated for four Canadian Screen Awards including, Best Series, Best Direction, Best Editing, and Best Sound. Lorraine went on to win Best Direction Documentary Series and Best Editing Documentary Series went to her editor, Pauline Decroix. Her latest documentary, The Hairdresser (La Coiffieuse), focuses on an 83 year old woman who provides haircare for terminally ill patients.
Kathleen is a hairdresser. Always has been. Always will be. Even at 83, she is still doing hair. Just not in the way you would expect.
This documentary short received its world premiere at the 2021 Hot Docs International Film Festival where it received an honorable mention for Best Canadian Short and finished second in the shorts Audience Choice Awards. It also screened at Atlanta Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, AFI Docs Film Festival. We had the pleasure of talking with Lorraine about her film, its origins, how the film changed her outlook on death, how she persevered through the challenges, and much much more!
The film is dedicated to your grandmother. Can you talk a bit about how she influenced or inspired this project?
My grandmother, Cara Price, was always an ostentatious dresser. She dyed her shoulder length hair fire engine red, and I never saw her leave the house without bright red lipstick to match. Cara wore floral print blouses and costume jewelry, her nails were long and often ornately decorated with designs and mini rhinestones. Well into her eighties, she could still be seen teetering down her driveway in Los Angeles atop platform sandals. Her style was loud and unapologetic. But when my grandmother passed away in hospice care, on top of having dementia, she was barely recognizable to me—her hair was short and white, her nails nude, and her lips pale. It felt as though she was gone long before she left us. I was so absorbed by my grief and the desire to mitigate her suffering that I neglected to consider the importance of that outward-facing identity that she had cultivated her whole life. It never occurred to me to paint her nails or put some lipstick on her but I’m sure it would have meant a lot to her. I dedicated the film to her because making it was a way for me to honor her memory. It’s also my way of saying sorry because I didn’t think to do those things for her.
How did you hear about Kathleen and her remarkably touching profession?
Shortly after my grandmother passed away, I read a small newspaper article in La Presse about a woman named Kathleen Mahony, who volunteered to do hair and makeup for the terminally ill at the palliative care unit at Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal. Learning about Kathleen’s work transformed my understanding of end-of-life care, and I was finally able to process some of what I felt at the end of my grandmother’s life. I reached out to Kathleen immediately after reading the article, and we embarked on the journey to make this documentary together.
What was it like entering into Kathleen’s world to make this film?
Kathleen is such a warm, vivacious, and accepting person, so in that sense it was very easy to slip into her world. She has so many stories about people she has met over the years. It was hard to choose which ones to include in the film! I mean, she’s been volunteering as a hairdresser in palliative care for 31 years. That’s a long time. When we were shooting, it was very clear that Kathleen’s priority was the patient—as it should be. For example, for an 83 year old woman, Kathleen moves very quickly. But she also washes hair with a bucket of water and a basin in the patient’s bed. If she doesn’t move quickly the water grows cold and then the patient is uncomfortable. Under different circumstances, I might have asked the person we were filming to slow down slightly so we could be sure to capture everything, but in this case we just had to adjust to the rhythm of the room and accept that there would be no special allowances for us. It was probably the most purely observational experience I’ve had as a documentary filmmaker for that reason. We were guests in that sacred space, and if we got in the way, Kathleen was not impressed! That room belonged to her and Madame Lalonde, and I was very conscious of respecting that.
Was it difficult to get Kathleen’s patients to agree to be in the film?
Well, we only did three shoots total. We shot twice at the hospital in the fall of 2019 and both were with Madame Lalonde. There was one other patient who wasn’t interested in participating. I had more shoots planned for spring 2020 and intended to shoot with more patients, but when COVID hit, it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t be shooting in a hospital anytime soon. Also, Kathleen was 83 and so, she needed to be very careful about who she interacted with and where she went.
The rules in the palliative care unit were such that we weren’t allowed into the room to ask a patient to participate in the film. That’s why, in the film, we shoot Kathleen from the hallway as she introduces herself to Madame Lalonde for the first time. What isn’t in the film is Kathleen telling Madame Lalonde about the documentary crew following her around for the day and asking her if she wants to participate. We were lucky that Madame Lalonde was so open and willing to be a part of the project and that Kathleen was so good at pitching it! I’m so grateful that Madame Lalonde is the patient we got to spend time with actually. She was so endearing, and charming, and even got a couple of jokes in!
What was your process for assembling Kathleen's stories and the footage you shot into the finished film?
Well, it took me four years to make this film—the hospital administration changed and I lost access, then I regained access, but the hospital was shuffling around the units and I couldn’t shoot during the move; Kathleen is a snowbird and spends every winter in Florida, so I had to wait for her to come back to Montreal—there were a lot of delays. Over the years, while I was waiting, I would go visit Kathleen at her house with a lav and my Zoom recorder. I would just sit on her couch, and we would just talk. She told me stories, and I recorded them. All of the VO in the film comes from those conversations. There is way more audio tape than footage on the cutting room floor!
Four years is a long time to wait to shoot, but I knew I really wanted to make this film, so I just kept at it until all the pieces fell into place. It looks so simple and effortless on screen, but this film is the result of years of perseverance. But that’s filmmaking!
How did you and your cinematographer Jacquelyn Mills nail down the film’s aesthetics?
Ah. Well, there is always this negotiation between creative vision, budget, and the requirements of the environment you’ll be shooting in, right? I wanted to work with Jacky because I love her eye. She’s able to get so close without being intrusive and she has such a light touch with the camera. Her camera just kind of floats effortlessly around whatever she is shooting—it’s so beautiful. So I wanted her to bring that quality to the film. And we knew we wanted her to be able to adjust quickly and not have to pick up sticks every time she wanted to move, so we went with a monopod. But one of the major unknowns was how it was going to feel to bring a camera into a patient’s room, regardless of how small our crew was or how barebones we were with our gear. We had to absorb development into production—there was no exploratory process regarding how it was going to feel to point the camera at someone so vulnerable. It was just me and Jacky in terms of crew, and I was on sound, so I needed Jacky to be pretty independent with the framing and the timing. I remember at one point, while we were shooting, she turned to me and whispered, “I think we have to cut up the images, it just doesn’t feel right to hold on her face.” And she was so right. I really have to credit Jacky for that, she has such remarkable emotional intelligence. I just trust her implicitly. She saw in the moment that we needed to adapt, and she just started kind of floating around the interaction between Kathleen and Madame Lalonde and concentrating on hands, hair, and water. I think that is such a major part of why the film feels gentle and compassionate as opposed to exploitative, which was something Jacky and I were both afraid of. At least it feels that way to me! And I hope it feels that way to audiences, too.
What drew you to the visual arts? How did you get into directing?
I always wanted to be a storyteller but I thought I would be a novelist. I studied creative writing and english literature in my undergrad and did an MA in literary translation studies. And then, when I was defending my master’s thesis I was also training as an amateur boxer in Québec, and I learned about this story that no one really knew outside of the boxing community. I thought it would make a great documentary. So, I teamed up with a co-director, Juliet Lammers, and we decided to make what would become our debut documentary film, Last Woman Standing. That was kind of it for me. I fell in love with filmmaking. I don’t think I will ever give up the dream of writing a novel—maybe I will someday—but I really love the collaborative aspect of filmmaking. And actually, I think my background in literature has been a huge asset in terms of character development and story structure.
What films or filmmakers have inspired you, your style, or your approach to telling a story?
I cast a wide net when it comes to influences and they will change depending on what I am working on. I know I’m not alone when I say that Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell had an enormous influence on the way I approach storytelling though, and that is across the board no matter what I’m working on. It’s just such a brilliant film. I am, of course, influenced by the greats like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, especially when it comes to interviews. Herzog’s concept of the “Ecstatic Truth” is something that speaks to me as a storyteller. I love Asif Kapadia’s films—one of my dreams is to construct a film entirely out of archival footage. I am really excited by what Kristen Johnston has been doing lately with her creative non-fiction—I think about her film Camreaperson all the time. I also LOVE sports docs of all kinds. I can never get enough of them—making them and watching them. Speaking of sports docs, I have to give a shout out to Roman Hodel’s gorgeous short documentary The Game, which is also at AFI Docs in the same block as my film. I highly recommend checking it out if you get the chance.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
Kathleen’s work is so valuable and so meaningful but it’s far from universal. We still avoid discussions around death and dying. Taboos still dominate our relationship to the end of life. My hope is that this film will invite audiences to consider what it means to die with dignity and broaden our understanding of our loved ones' needs as they approach the end of their own stories.
Do you have any future projects in the works that you can share with us?
Yes! I am currently working on a creative non-fiction film which tells my grandmother’s story in more detail. It’s called Every Time We Say Goodbye. The impetus for that film comes from a series of letters I discovered several years ago between my family members, which document my grandmother’s first psychotic break in the 1950s. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder but that diagnosis didn’t really exist at the time. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a film about family and memory, the legacy of mental illness and inherited trauma. Creatively what I am really excited about with this film is that it’s a docu/fiction hybrid where facts are lacking, so myself and my family members will speculate or even invent to fill in the blanks.
I’m also developing my first feature film, Death In Small Places, which is largely inspired by making The Hairdresser and spending time thinking about dying with dignity. Death In Small Places is about two daughters returning home when they learn that their mother has been approved for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). They come together to spend the last ten days of the mother’s life as a family but, of course, life doesn’t stop churning in the face of their personal tragedy and family tensions and secrets rise to the surface while everyone is also trying to grapple with the mother’s decision to end her own life. I’m writing the script and still working it out, but that’s the gist!
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!