By Jane Durrell
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

“I think of them as pioneers, expressing a new kind of existence with imagination and sending it back for us to sample,” says director Melissa Godoy of the vibrant artists who appear in her recently completed documentary, Do Not Go Gently.

Featured artists
The hour-long film is based on a series of individual interviews, including three artists in varying fields, all in their 80s or beyond. The documentary, which will air this spring on American Public Television, is narrated by Walter Cronkite.

Frederic Franklin, 90, British-born ballet great, teaches young dancers and appears on stage himself in non-dancing roles. “I love it. At my age, it’s just right,” he says. “I can express things and use my arms and hands and I have a lovely time.”

Eighty-two-year-old Arlonzia Pettway is the oldest now of the Gee’s Bend, Ala., quilt makers, whose modernistic work of strong abstract designs can be seen in several prominent museums.

Another early modernist, avant garde composer Leo Ornstein, is interviewed at the age of 109. His last work, Piano Sonata Number 8, was composed when he was 98.

“I think it is evolutionary that the generation that invented modernism can continue to create,” Godoy says, “and I think we must pay attention to what they are saying through their art, from a perspective that is relatively new.”

Prominent gerontologist Gene D. Cohen, M.D., also featured in the documentary, says, “Many older people have this inner voice in effect that says, ‘If not now, when? Why not? What can they do to me?’ And then this new inner feeling of liberation translates into creative expression in later life.”

“They ride the joyful wave of imagination,” Godoy says about the individuals featured in Do Not Go Gently.

Mother-daughter duo
The Cincinnati-based director, producer, and writer for the film enlisted her mother, Eileen Littig, 68, as executive producer after Littig retired from a long career producing public television in Wisconsin.