“Blind people don't run”: Escaping the “nursing home specter” in Children of Nature and Cloudburst

• I compare two films that depict older couples who escape from nursing homes.
• Their shared themes are significant because of their extremely different contexts.
• Popular culture conveys the nursing home as an individual, familial, and social failure.
• The films portray perceived lack of choice and desire in institutional care.
• We need to challenge that view, in order to change attitudes towards institutional care.

The paper compares two films, Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar, Iceland, Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, 1991) and Cloudburst (Canada, Thom Fitzgerald, 2010), which share remarkable similarities, despite their difference in historical and geographical origin. In focusing on these two examples, the paper shows the extent to which a widespread fear of long-term residential care evident in popular discourse motivates larger commentaries about growing old. Each narrative presents a romance catalyzed by the threat of long-term residential care. In both stories, the couples are depicted as fugitives from the law, escaping what is perceived as a fate worse than death in order to pursue death on their own terms. The paper explores the structure and significance of how they leave and what they accomplish while they are away. The films offer examples of a broader cultural discourse that is damaging, while they are also heartening in their satisfying representation of the possibility of escape. Through that, they indicate the importance of choice and desire to transforming residential care in a manner that could also transform popular understandings of the “nursing home.”