Aging and social inequalities.

Credit: Agnaldo Dias Correia.

How do socioeconomic conditions shape ageing? This is the reflection that the

documentary “Ageing: A Personal Journey” seeks to bring, through interviews with older

persons from the most diverse social strata.

The film premiered on June 5th at the Theater of the University of São Paulo’s School

of Medicine (FMUSP), on the occasion of the “Brazil-United Kingdom Meeting on

Healthy Aging and Inequalities”. The documentary will also be available on the FMUSP

YouTube channel.

The 30-minute film features 11 interviewees to discuss what healthy ageing is. The work

was conceived within a research project on healthy ageing and social inequalities,

carried out in a partnership between FMUSP and Newcastle University, in the United

Kingdom. The project is led by Claudia Kimie Suemoto, associate professor of geriatrics

at FMUSP and researcher at the Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil), and

Matthew Prina, professor of Ageing and Epidemiology within the Population Health

Sciences Institute at Newcastle University.

“This partnership between FMUSP and Newcastle University is innovative, not only

because of the topic, but also because of the way the results are presented. In addition

to the traditional scientific research data on the relationship between healthy aging and

socioeconomic inequalities, there was a request to produce a short film addressing the

topic. This is completely outside the routine of FMUSP research.” explained geriatrician

Marcel Hiratsuka, a member of the research team and one of the film’s scriptwriters. “I

consider it a pioneering initiative that broadens the scope of scientific debate in our

society.”

The characters in the film include elderly people living on the streets, residents of the

outskirts of São Paulo, and even the last resident of a village that is on the brink of

extinction. The stories show that, while healthy ageing does depend on economic

conditions, it is also highly individual. Economic status alone does not define what a

person considers to be a quality of old age.

“One of the main challenges was selecting the characters, because there were so many

paths to follow and so many incredible stories that could be told. But I believe we

managed to create a representative film that makes us think about the many ways we.

Can age and what is involved in this process,” said Lilian Liang, journalist and one of the

documentary’s producers.

The documentary also features testimonies from representatives of minorities or

historically marginalized groups, such as women, black people, people with disabilities,

and LGBTQIAPN+ people. Targeted by inequalities imposed by society, these

populations often end up suffering double prejudice when they cross the age of 60.

“We captured the stories of 11 people from different social classes in a very streamlined

process that required care at every stage — from finding the right characters to filming

in a sensitive way. In editing, the biggest challenge was to condense the richness of

each story into about two minutes, without losing the essence of what each person had

to say,” highlighted director Gabriel Martinez, who has been exploring the theme of

aging in his films for ten years.

The youngest interviewee is 64 years old, and the oldest is 98 years old. With the

exception of one, all interviews were recorded in the city of São Paulo. Pictures from the event are now available; click here.