Episode 9:7 Documentary Filmmaker Sky Bergman on the “Why” Behind Lives Well Lived and Her New Intergenerational Passion Project

Sky Bergman was inspired by her active 100-year-old Italian grandmother to document the wisdom of older adults. After spending four years interviewing 40 people with a cumulative life experience of 3,000 years, she released the film Lives Well Lived to critical acclaim.

About Sky

Sky Bergman (she/her) is an accomplished, award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Lives Well Lived is Sky’s directorial debut. Her fine art work is included in permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her commercial work has appeared on book covers for Random House and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and magazine spreads in Smithsonian, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, Reader’s Digest, and Archaeology Odyssey.

Sky Bergman is Professor Emeritus of Photography and Video and a former Department Chair of the Art & Design Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. She has two short films about intergenerational connections currently on the film festival circuit and is working on a feature-length film that is a celebration of love.

Key Takeaways

• The Lives Well Lived intergenerational program pairs high school and college students and older adults, using the 20 questions from the film as prompts.
• Both the older adults and the young students say they have far more in common than their differences. The only difference is their age.
• Senior living communities can adopt their own Lives Well Lived project by downloading the discussion guide on the website, including best practices in interviewing.

Watch Lives Well Lived on PBS, Amazon, and iTunes.