Netflix released the trailer for the documentary film Dick Johnson Is Dead directed by Kirsten Johnson that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Non-fiction Storytelling. The film will debut on Netflix on October 2, 2020.

Sundance describes the documentary film as Kirsten Johnson’s delirious and desperate attempt to keep her aging father alive. In this effort she turns to the magic of cinema to kill him, resurrect him, and celebrate his last years on earth. Their challenge is heightened by the erosive effect of dementia, which menaces Dick Johnson.

A lifetime of making documentaries has convinced award-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson of the power of the real. But now she’s ready to use every escapist movie-making trick in the book – staging inventive and fantastical ways for her 86-year-old psychiatrist father to die while hoping that cinema might help her bend time, laugh at pain and keep her father alive forever.

The darkly funny and wildly imaginative Dick Johnson Is Dead is a love letter from a daughter to a father, creatively blending fact and fiction to create a celebratory exploration of how movies give us the tools to grapple with life’s profundity.