By Ali Ikram
The Documentary Edge Festival launched tonight in Auckland and will be in Wellington in coming weeks.
One of the festival’s featured films is The Mayor about love, sex and death in an American retirement home.
In the documentary Sam Berger, known as the mayor, is a self confessed ladies man who has plenty of choice at his Texan retirement home, as women there out number men three to one.
"You want a girlfriend?" says one lady.
"No you don't want me, I don't want anyone," a man replies.
The residents talk about ladies in Florida who read the obituaries and "when somebody’s wife dies they run over with a brisket or a casserole and they never leave".
The documentary was inspired by a dinner conversation filmmaker Jared Scheib had with his grandma.
"Mama are people still having sex here,” he asked her.
“Oh sure... Just because you get old you don't have to lay down and die," his grandma replied.
Though do not go along to this movie expecting Basic Instinct.
"If I could get a hard on I would jump just about anyone willing," says one man.
"We're physically unable, period."
Instead it is the flirting and the companionship that Berger is really after.
"There is no such thing as happy endings when the end is near and you can see you're gone. That's not a happy ending."
Either way you will never look at life in a rest home the same again.
"I've had friends how have seen it or been to rough cut screenings and they have said it looks like being in college all over again and those were the best four years of my life I can't wait to be back there,” Scheib says.
"To me this is paradise. To a lot it isn't but you can't help what other people think,” Berger says.
“I'm having a ball, it's paradise for me."
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