Ex-Montrealer Documents Early-Onset Alzheimer's Journey
Heidi Levitt's intimate film 'Walk With Me' charts her family's four-year battle with a diagnosis that blindsided them.
When Charlie Hess got his early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis in 2019, he was 57 and foggy—the kind of foggy you chalk up to stress until it starts eroding everything you counted on. His wife, Heidi Levitt, a Los Angeles casting director with Montreal roots, did something brave and unflinching: she made a film about it.
Walk With Me isn't a feel-good story dressed up in documentary form. It's a raw, four-year account of living through a diagnosis that nobody in the family saw coming. Levitt captures the disorientation, the grief that arrives before anyone's died, the small humiliations and the moments of stubborn grace that puncture the decline.
What makes the film land is its refusal to sentimentalize. There are no sweeping strings or reassuring voiceovers about the power of love conquering all. Instead, there's the texture of actual life unraveling in real time—a man losing language, a wife learning to be both partner and caregiver, a marriage renegotiated in real time.
The Montreal première is coming, and it's the kind of work that lingers. Not because it's easy to watch, but because it insists on showing you something true.