I saw this on the Morning Show this morning. This is a 19 year old who with 2 friends, went and lived in an assisted living facility for the summer. The interview was great, the clips really heart touching. His blog adds more to the stories and the movie will be shown on Cinemax tonight I believe.

From the NY Times
By MIKE HALE
Published: January 15, 2008
Tammy Signorile, a sharp-witted 95-year-old with a klaxon voice that seldom rests, is one of the stars of the documentary “Andrew Jenks, Room 335.” Late in the film, in a rare moment of sentiment, she offers a philosophy of life: “It doesn’t take much to make somebody feel good. Say something nice to them, tell them how nice they are instead of looking for defects, instead of looking for something they’re not doing right.”

In that spirit I won’t dwell on the fatuous self-regard and not-quite-believable naïveté of Mr. Jenks, a New York University film school student who made “Room 335” when he was 19. Let’s just say that the residents of Harbor Place, the assisted-living center in Florida where he lived and filmed for a month in the summer of 2005, seem more genuinely curious about him than he does about them.

But still, after Mr. Jenks spends the first six minutes of the film explaining his mission (“I want to move in because I feel like I could actually learn a lot from old people. They’ve lived life longer than anyone else”), he takes his camera into a world that’s usually invisible and shines a light on a population that many of us would just as soon forget. There’s something to be said for that, even if the light doesn’t reveal much we don’t already know about the lives and opinions of the elderly.

Among the several hundred residents of Harbor Place, Mr. Jenks has no trouble finding people who, like Ms. Signorile, are articulate and entertaining and more than willing to play to his camera. In the course of the month he’s also present for moments, embarrassing or harrowing, where the camera seems like an almost criminal invasion of privacy. The residents mostly just seem to be glad to have company.

The institutional setting of “Andrew Jenks, Room 335,” being shown on Tuesday night as part of Cinemax’s “Reel Life” series, inevitably calls to mind the work of the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, maker of “Titicut Follies,” “Hospital” and “Near Death.” The contrast in styles, of course, couldn’t be greater: where Mr. Wiseman is famously self-effacing, Mr. Jenks is ever present, seemingly in every frame, paying his puppy-dog attentions to the old folks and desperately wanting them to like him.

Ah well, I said I wouldn’t dwell. Let’s give the last word to Mr. Jenks, who, after a month of recording the dignity, good humor and forbearance of his temporary neighbors, does in fact learn something. “They’re just such incredible people,” he says. “I never realized that’d be the case.”

ANDREW JENKS, ROOM 335

Cinemax, Tuesday night at 7, Eastern and Pacific times; 6, Central time.

Directed and produced by Andrew Jenks; Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew, editor; William Godel, assistant director. For Cinemax Reel Life: Geof Bartz, editor; John Hoffman, supervising producer; Sheila Nevins, executive producer.