The short film “4th Dementia” manages to do something incredible: make a film about Alzheimer’s Disease that is funny. It may seem like an unlikely premise, but this 16-minute short film manages to bring humor and dignity to a topic that is often portrayed as tragic and depressing.
The film starts with a more typical portrayal of Alzheimer’s. Family members gather to celebrate Nellie’s birthday who seems confused and bewildered by the events before her. But soon, the film takes us to another world. Nellie’s dementia causes her to flit through different dimensions, kind of like Everything Everywhere All at Once. Nellie jumps to worlds where she is a wealthy matriarch, to another world where she is the action lead in a film by her grandson and even to a world where she is a Hasidic mob boss. Through her many lives, she’s trying to find the love of her life, her husband. It’s a beautiful and important film.
“4th Dementia” stars Caroline Aaron, known for her work on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Bill Irwin, known for his work as Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street as well as other television and movies. The film is created by the comedy collective and writing team Dinner For One, made up of Ally Condrath, Jake Mann, Kyle Miller, and Ian Wexler.
Cinema Femme spoke with co-writer, actor, and producer Ally Condrath about the film that debuted on Omeleto on January 12th, 2026.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is this film so important?
It’s a new perspective on something that has been talked about a lot in film, mostly in a really somber, dramatic way. For writers who have all experienced this disease with a loved one, we wanted to touch on the humor and bring some levity to a disease that we really don’t know a lot about, even though it’s been around for so long and so many people suffer from it.
What was the impetus for the film?
We actually come from a TV development background. For years, we were pitching TV shows. “4th Dementia” was actually first an idea for a television series that came out of our sketch comedy group, Dinner for One. We’ve been doing live sketch comedy for 15 years now, and we were figuring out how we can bring sketch comedy to a narrative story.
We also wanted to highlight an older actress, and we thought: how can we bring someone like Carol Burnett into a leading role and show how you can use comedy in an emotional way?
The film just came about from telling stories of our grandparents. One writer, Jake, talked about how his grandfather who had dementia thought that his dad was in the Russian mob. My grandmother used to tell me about the butter shortage in World War II, and was hoarding butter in our house when she was impacted by the disease.
We were laughing about all these stories. We thought, ”Maybe we can create little vignettes or little sketches about this, and then also be able to touch on this disease that we’re all scared of getting. We’re all 30 something’s knowing this disease is all in our genetics. How do we make something beautiful out of it?”
The line between tragedy and comedy is so small. In acting school, they used to have us do this exercise where you had to laugh, then cry, then laugh and then cry again, because there’s such a fine line between the two.
We thought: “this is something that scares us, and it’s something that’s tragic. How can we find the humor in it as well?” That’s kind of where this film came to be. We started creating all these different scenarios, and some of them were extreme that didn’t even make it in the film, like at one point, Nellie talks to a dog named Mr. Squidgeums that can speak in tongues. It was so wild. As we kept writing and revising, we realized we had to tone it down for the emotional aspect of it to get to that heartful scene at the end.
I’ve seen how humor can often help people accept harder things than if you were told outright.
Humor allows you to kind of accept the tragedy and accept the sadness if you find something funny in it. Every time we pitched it as a TV show, everyone was like: “A comedy about Alzheimer’s? This is so inappropriate. We can’t do this.” Everyone we talked to was like: “we don’t understand what you’re trying to do here. This is so above and beyond what we can comprehend.” That’s what made us actually just make it. We thought the only way someone’s going to understand this idea is if we put pen to paper and we actually make it happen.
We come from a comedy background where we learned pretty quickly where that line between comedy and tragedy was. How do we actually uplift people who are dealing with this? We’ve had a couple of people come up to us and be like: “my mom’s gone through this and to think that this is maybe what she’s experiencing would make me so happy. When she’s not lucid, I hope that she’s going on adventures. You made me feel like that could be a possibility.” That gave us joy throughout the whole thing.
I think you all managed it with this film. You raise Nellie from the more typical depiction of someone with Alzheimer’s—someone who is pathetic and sad—to someone who is finding herself through her adventures. She becomes more of a main character of her own life.
You hit it on the nail on the head. That was our whole goal. When we first wrote it, we wanted to make sure that she was not asking herself: “Where am I? What is this? What’s going on?” for every scenario. By the end of the film, she’s able to recognize that she’s the leader in her own movie. She can speak a different language. We want her to think: “Okay, how do I use this to my advantage to get what I want?”
Caroline was a huge facilitator in that work. We shot eight scenes in eight different setups in four days in the same room. So we had to switch over the room two times a day, which was wild. I also produced the film, so I was in charge of that whole changeover, because when you do independent film, you have to do more than one job. Caroline was really great at saying: “Okay, we still need to ground this in the reality of the disease. How do we play with where she is mentally each time?”
Okay, I have to ask about the Hasidic mob scene. Where did that come from? Was it inspired by your fellow writer’s story about his grandfather thinking his son was in the Russian mob? It was a little bit surreal but hilarious.
That was kind of what we were going for. Yes, it came from Jake, our other writer, having experienced that with his grandfather. The idea came from having a Three Stooges kind of scenario where Nellie’s in charge. We wanted to explore what would it look like for this woman who is kind of portrayed as very feeble at the beginning of the movie to come into her own and be like a boss.
Then once we found out that we had Caroline involved and that she was a Jewish actor that had worked on Mrs. Maisel, we thought we could actually make this like a full Yiddish scene. It turns out that she didn’t speak Yiddish. We actually had a Yiddish coach come in, which was great, and all three of the other actors had to learn Yiddish for the part, which was wild. That scene came from our sketch brain to figure out how we can get her into the most extreme situation so that she’s at her biggest height of fear before we have the final scene.
You mentioned how you played multiple roles in the making of film. Could you talk about managing all of that?
It was wild. It was the hardest thing I’ve done, and the best and most fun thing I’ve done in my life. I was with this project from start to finish, and really had to wear a lot of hats, starting with the casting. We didn’t have money to hire a casting director so I was actually contacting these A-list and B-list celebrities on my own. I had to find their information, and just pitch the film to people like Sally Fields. I actually got responses back and realized, “Oh, if you’re proactive, you just put yourself out there and you’re passionate about your material, they’re gonna reach out. The worst they can say is no.”
Once we got Caroline involved, we hit the ground running. Once Caroline was involved, Bill was like, “Yeah, I’m in.” Throughout the process, I was involved in the fundraising and the location finding. We had a cast and crew of over 50 people. We have about 35 different actors playing different versions of her family, which meant we were dealing with five to six actors coming in and out twice a day.
It really just became this huge lesson in filmmaking where we had some really amazing people who had done this before and knew what they were doing on set. Then there were people who hadn’t done this before and were using the film as a tool to learn, like the little girl in the dance scene. She was from my hometown in Pennsylvania. She is an actor who wanted to see what it was like to be on a film set. So she came in and we got to show her and introduce her to the cinematographer and the lighting design people in the production designer.
The whole thing was a full-on hands-on event. When we were changing rooms twice a day, we had the director, myself, the other producer, other actors, and the gaffers actually lifting couches and moving things and changing sets. It was one of those things that once everyone was passionate about it; everyone was a team player. It made the film feel really special by the end, because we were all working together to create something really difficult in a very short amount of time.
You shot the entire thing in four days?
The filming was four days and 16 pages of filming. Usually films do like one or two pages a day. But then we were dealing with over 30 costume changes and eight design changes. We only had the space from eight to six every day. Plus Caroline was so sick the whole time. She had the flu by day two, and she was such a trooper. She was just like: “Let’s do it.” And she’s in almost every shot of the film and the camera is right in her face, practically.
She was sick almost the entire time? She managed to bring Nellie really alive in the film.
She’s a person who’s been doing supporting roles her whole life for 40 years. She’s been in Woody Allen films and Nora Ephron films. It was really cool to see her shine in something where it was just raw and just her.
Was this Dinner for One’s first film?
This is our first short film. We did a web series called “Life Sucks,” which was about middle school in the year 2000. We all played the 13 year old versions of ourselves. We had made six 30-minute episodes of that, and then tried to sell it. But Pen15 came out first, our project died. That was kind of our first foray into filmmaking. I think we got so burned out from that process so it took us a while to make something new. We’ve done a lot of digital sketches for things like Funny or Die, MTV, and Comedy Central. “4th Dementia” was our first short that went to festivals.
You’ve been part of this comedy collective for many years. How is it to write and work collaboratively?
We all met on the first day of school in college. One of the guys in the group is my husband, who I started dating on the third day of college. We haven’t all separated since. We were the kids who made films on the weekends instead of going to parties.
When we moved to New York, we started doing live sketch comedy, and we found the best way to write was with all four of us in a room, connecting a laptop to a TV, and just riffing and improvising. It just worked for us. It’s at that point that if one of us writes something separately and brings it into the group, we’re like: “No, this doesn’t work,” because we all have to put our little stamp on it, which is really nice. I think that’s what creates our voice, all four of us, and it’s all very improv based.
We’re just sitting in a room making up jokes until something hits. I’m usually the one with the laptop, and I take all of those ideas and put them into a thing that we can actually read and go from there. We’ve been doing that now for 15 years, and we do it with every process. We just finished writing our first feature, so it was 100 pages of sitting in a room together, which can be hard at moments but at the same time, we’re constantly editing each other, which is really nice. So the first draft is almost like your third or fourth, because you’re getting so many eyeballs on it at the same time.
In business school, we did a lot of group projects, which most people hated. But when they went well, it went really well. That sounds like what you have here.
We have our moments where none of us can agree on an idea, and it’s just like hitting your head against a wall. But when you do get to that moment where it works, it’s gold, and it feels electric. For that last scene, I remember when we finally got that on the page and we got it to a place where it didn’t feel trite or too overdone or flowery. We read it, and we went: “Okay, we can see this.”
On the day of the shoot, we had the actors rehearse it in Caroline’s dressing room. The four of us just started to cry, because it was like, “Oh, wow. It took hours toiling over the last scene until we thought it was great. You actually made it even greater. You found something we didn’t even have in there between the two.” That was the coolest moment on set.
How was the film received? How was it to have the film out in the festival circuit?
Festival work is wild. It’s a crazy world. You may think that it’s just making a film, submitting it, and then you’re good to go. That’s not the case in reality. There’s 8,000 to 10,000 submissions at some of these festivals. You have to get noticed and you have to get seen. So a lot of that work was figuring out how to connect with people at these festivals beforehand.
A lot of people don’t know that when they go through this process that they have to pitch the movie to people who are either in programming or have been at the festival before and can advocate for you. A lot of the process is just constantly speaking about your film to people and hoping that they’ll watch it. We were really fortunate that we came from Emerson College in Boston. We had all these people who had either gone to these festivals or were part of them and were able to advocate for the film.
We got it into some really cool places like HollyShorts Film Festival and Santa Barbara International Film Festival. We won an Oscar-qualifying Screenplay Award at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival.
Once you’re in that space and people watch your film, it’s terrifying to sit there and be like: “Okay, I hope you laugh at the places you’re supposed to laugh and cry at the places.” It’s different for every audience.
What has been amazing is the response afterwards. You don’t realize how many people have a correlation to this disease. Most people have someone in their life who has experienced it. We didn’t realize the film would touch so many people on so many different levels. The response has been overwhelming. Nurses are contacting us saying, “Hey, I’d love to show this to caregivers as a way of showing relief or some sort of joy in this process while they’re going through it or after they’ve gone through it.”
Have you considered creating a sort of curriculum for it to be used in health contexts? That first scene is a textbook scene of what not to do with someone who has dementia.
I’d love to get it to someplace like Hilarity for Charity, Seth Rogen and his wife Lauren Miller’s Alzheimer’s organization and places like that, who really appreciate caregivers.
What is it like to have it debut on Omeleto?
We’re excited. I’m excited to finally get it out there. I don’t know how many times my aunts and uncles have been like: “When are we gonna see it?” It’s nice to actually get the world to see it finally, and we’re excited to see what the response is like, and see what people take from it.
What’s really great about Omeleto is they curate some really cool short films, and people really take the time to watch and comment. The comments are beautiful on Omeleto. It seems like people are really invested in it. So I’m really excited to see what comes with it and what people think.
What do you want people to take away from the film?
I think the biggest thing is humor and that we can find light in the darkest of places. Imagination is so powerful and so important. I think we lose that when we’re younger, and maybe there’s a way back to that. Maybe we can find a new place to imagine and figure out. I think in those dire situations with Alzheimer’s, maybe your mother is going through something beautiful, and we don’t even know it.
