Betty survived the holocaust to start a trailblazing family in New York. But now that she’s on life support, her survival instinct means she refuses to pass on, and soon will sap the family’s dwindling savings and put them out on the streets - unless they do the unthinkable.

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The Bergman family’s only chance of survival is to kill Nana.
Betty is a survivor. My Grandma, or as I call her, Nana, fled from the Nazis when they took her father off to Auschwitz, never to return. She stayed in hiding for years on a farm in France as her people were systematically hunted and sent off to their deaths. When the Nazis searched the home she stayed in, she held her panicked breath, hiding in a chicken coop to evade her would-be killers.
She survived, and when the war was over, she left her home to come to New York city to live the American dream. She married my Grandfather, a man so traumatized by fighting the war, that he became an emotionally abusive alcoholic. Though they had my mother, Brenda, Nana was strong willed and divorced Grandpa Marvin in the 50’s in spite of divorce being socially unacceptable at the time.
But she made a life for herself as a single mom, and became the first woman to ever work on commission on the men’s floor at Saks Fifth Avenue. Facing rampant sexism and endless adversity, she outlasted and outlived every man in her department. She built a life, and a legacy, and a family that would not exist without her defiance.
Betty Bider is a survivor. And that’s the problem. Because now, on the eve of her 98th birthday, even though she is thoroughly demented, bedridden on life support, and conversing with ghosts galavanting above her, she refuses to go quietly into the light. And it’s killing the family.
My mom is at her wits end, babysitting Betty, trapped in her own limbo as she enters her 70’s, her autumn years wasting away like her mother. She self-medicates with alcohol, and it’s killing her. I sometimes wonder who will go first. My dear stepdad Bob lives separately from her in the family apartment, while my mom lives at Betty’s to take care of her. So their post-retirement years of marriage are paused indefinitely, and they haven’t been intimate in five years. My sister Natasha is coping as best as she can with two crazy parents who are circling the drain of sanity and refusing to prepare for their ever-nearing end. And I, Alexander Bergman, have run away from all of it to the golden shores of Los Angeles.
You can run from life, but life is faster. And now it’s caught up to all of us. My golden shores are golden, sure, but that’s from the flames. I don’t know what my future looks like, but it’s not looking pretty.
You see, if things keep going the way they are going, and Betty’s survival instincts keep her alive to a hundred, the family’s meager blue collar savings will be gone. My parents will be out of money, and have no safety net for their own palliative care when the time comes. My sister is a grade-school singing teacher, and I’m a struggling filmmaker. We can barely take care of ourselves. The whole family’s a ticking time bomb, and unless we do something drastic, every one of us will end up on the streets.
The only solution we can imagine is to Kill Nana.
The film opens on this realization. I fly to New York for an emergency family meeting. The situation is dire. We all agree there is only one solution. But how? And who will do the deed?
The film travels back in time, paints the portrait of Betty, and her life, while bouncing back to now, and showing my mother Brenda’s amazing life as a punk soul singer in the 70’s, and my sister’s path in her mothers footsteps, as she puts her comedy musical shows on in NYC today. It’s about three generations of women, all carrying and evolving the trailblazing spirit Nana provided. We follow the family and its individual characters through daily life, and relate it to the financial struggles of late stage capitalism, especially hot-button issues like healthcare in the US, and how it eats families alive until they’re dead.
We’ll talk about how Betty decided to come to New York over Israel, and why she made those choices. We’re asking the real, tough, hard hitting questions. Does the American dream exist at all? Was it just a fantasy that lured Nana here, and got the rest of us stuck in something that turned out to be a nightmare? Where on this earth can the Jewish people survive, and thrive? Is the Jewish soul a transient, spiritual concept? Can it be grounded in soil and take root, without torment and toil?
And then back to the central theme. We have to kill Nana.
Spoiler: no, of course we won’t kill our grandmother. I would say we’ll let nature take its course, but there’s nothing natural about our modern scientific methods used to keep someone alive when their body is doing everything in its power to let them rest. Betty will rest, eventually. It will be portrayed in the documentary as something that finally happens, like a miracle, when we are steeled in our plans and ready to do the deed ourselves.
The family will survive. We will figure it out. The film will end with a hopeful coda for the family Bergman and their hopes and dreams. We will carry on Betty’s legacy, and cherish the woman who brought us into this crazy world. And we will carry the torch of the soul of the Jewish people, wherever the light may guide it.

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A comedic, cinematic documentary with fantastical elements, and some planned subversions of the format with the central conceit, this will blur the line between reality and fiction with its high-stakes hook. A little Grey Gardens. Highly cinematic, shot on 16mm for much of the runtime, with interspersed interviews and confessionals filmed on modern cinema cameras.
I will use lots of old photos, found media, and archival footage to bring the larger perspective into the story. This will all be mixed in with old video interviews of Betty from Spielberg’s Shoah foundation, and many other interviews and footage I’ve taken of her over the years, which I have a ton of, so this will be a touching tribute to Betty in her own words, too. To thread the dissonant past with the present, we will weave in cinematic re-enactments, simply rendered but powerfully executed pieces of the past that will put you in Nana’s, and Brenda’s shoes.
A comedic, cinematic documentary with fantastical elements, and some planned subversions of the format with the central conceit, this will blur the line between reality and fiction with its high-stakes hook. A little Grey Gardens. Highly cinematic, shot on 16mm for much of the runtime, with interspersed interviews and confessionals filmed on modern cinema cameras.
I will use lots of old photos, found media, and archival footage to bring the larger perspective into the story. This will all be mixed in with old video interviews of Betty from Spielberg’s Shoah foundation, and many other interviews and footage I’ve taken of her over the years, which I have a ton of, so this will be a touching tribute to Betty in her own words, too. To thread the dissonant past with the present, we will weave in cinematic re-enactments, powerfully executed pieces of the past that will put you in Nana’s, and Brenda’s shoes. Starring Natasha and Brenda, who are both trained actors and will play their own mothers, which will be a total trip of a way to work out generational trauma.
Much of the music of the film will be performed live by Natasha and Brenda, creating an all encompassing vision of the Bergman family’s entertainment, and the centerpiece of the film will be a live show, for the first time ever Brenda and Natasha will perform together.
As a narrative, commercial, and documentary director/DP with 20 years experience, I have a honed technical grasp of my craft, and an exuberant style that comes from my deep understanding of the medium. My willingness to push the boundaries to deliver powerful, emotionally driven cinema is a boon to this type of project in particular. This is a project I was born to make, I’ve been planning for over a decade and now I am finally ready, and passionately excited about bringing this film to life.

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Nana's signature joke that she said a million times and it never got old. When one of us got on her nerves, she would say “I escaped Hitler… For this?!”
The darkly comedic nature of the film taps into a quintessentially Jewish point of view - that a humorous and irreverent attitude is a necessary shield against suffering. It’s about the outsider perspective we as Jews bring to a mad world, and how that sensibility has evolved over generations of American Jews.
Comedy and performance are a unifying pillar of our Jewish identities. It lad to us all going into show business. Brenda grew up going to the bungalow colonies in the Borscht Belt and was the star of all the musicals there. But while she thrived as a performer, her inherited trauma from a holocaust/ immigrant daughter and her experience of having no models for how to live in America in the revolutionary 60s was a mindfuck for Betty who came from old-school European tradition.
And Natasha tries to make her own path in entertainment, she is overshadowed by Brenda’s trying to work her unrealized ambitions from the past into Natasha’s approach.
The Jewish identity is ever evolving, and this film tracks our cultural viewpoints from the past to the future.

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As a narrative, commercial, and documentary director/DP with 20 years experience, I have a honed technical grasp of my craft, and an exuberant style that comes from my deep understanding of the medium. My willingness to push the boundaries to deliver powerful, emotionally driven cinema is a boon to this type of project in particular. This is a project I was born to make, I’ve been planning for over a decade and now I am finally ready, and passionately excited about bringing this film to life. My mother and sister are incredibly talented entertainers. I have been wanting to make a film about my mother, and my grandmother, for many years, and this allows me to accomplish both of those in one film. This is my legacy, my family’s story, how we survived and what we have learned from the past and how we want to apply it to the future. My goal is to create films that would make a real change in this post capitalist world. I want to organize a movement and leave a legacy as great as my grandmother.

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How do we celebrate a life while dealing with their death? And what if they don’t die? So many people are in this same situation, and do not have a connection to others going through the same issues. They can feel so alone. This film is to share with others how to deal with a protracted end of life from a loved one, by sharing in the process via my family’s grief and joy in the process.