Dick Johnson Is Dead

Kirsten Johnson, a New York documentary maker, adores her 86-year-old psychiatrist father Dick, the man who inspired her DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD. As his memory begins to fail and he makes medical mistakes with patients, she returns to Seattle and helps him shut down his practice. They pack up his house and he moves into her one-bedroom apartment in New York City. She proposes they collaborate on a film in which she'll stage a variety of his accidental deaths, in her effort to cope with the inevitable loss ahead. She gathers their close-knit church-going community to celebrate Dick in a realistic mock funeral, complete with Dick in an open casket. She enlists stunt men to double for Dad in "accidents" she films, a humorous way of dealing with a somber subject while creating a memory of her father that will live on.