On TV: LOOKS LIKE LAURY, SOUNDS LIKE LAURY

Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed tomorrow, Tuesday, March 10: LOOKS LIKE LAURY, SOUNDS LIKE LAURY

Pamela Hogan’s chronicle of the loss of a close friend makes its debut on the WORLD Channel tomorrow. The screening is part of the Strength of Women, a monthlong programming series in recognition of Women’s History Month.

Hogan, working in partnership with producer Connie Shulman, tells the poignant story of their friend Laury Sacks, a wife, mother, and sometime character actress, who suddenly and inexplicably begins losing her words. The once lively, quick-witted New Yorker soon finds herself frustratingly unable to speak coherently, putting an emotional drain on family, friends, and Laury herself. Even an eventual diagnosis – fronto-temporal dementia – offers little relief, as the neurological condition remains under-researched and untreatable. Shot over the course of a year, just as the disease takes hold, Hogan’s simple but touching film offers an intimate look at a woman’s attempts to reckon with the unthinkable – recognizing the fundamental change her condition forces on her very sense of self, but maddeningly being unable to articulate it to the outside world.