What does happiness look like when you have been promised it as a lifestyle? Lance Oppenheim's 2021 documentary Some Kind of Heaven goes behind the gates of America's largest retirement community, a manicured Florida development where the palm trees line up and the residents are still searching.
What is Some Kind of Heaven about?
The setting is a planned town built for people in their later years, complete with golf carts, dance halls and an endless calendar of clubs, the kind of place its marketing calls paradise. Oppenheim follows four people inside it: three who live there and one who has slipped in from the margins without quite belonging. Each of them is chasing something the brochure did not mention. For some it is companionship after a marriage has run out of steam; for others it is a fresh start late in life, or simply a place to sleep and a way to stay. The film never mocks its subjects, but it does let the artificial perfection of the surroundings sit in contrast with the very real loneliness, restlessness and longing of the people moving through them.
About the cast
The people on screen are not actors but residents and visitors of the community, among them Dennis Dean, Lynn Henry, Anne Kincer, Reggie Kincer, Gary Schwartz and Barbara Stanton. Oppenheim gives them room to speak for themselves, and their candour, sometimes funny and sometimes painful, carries the film.
Context & significance
Some Kind of Heaven arrived as the debut feature of Lance Oppenheim, a young American filmmaker who shot it in a highly composed, almost cinematic style unusual for observational documentary: wide symmetrical frames, saturated pastel colours and carefully staged tableaux that echo the community's own self-image. That visual approach became the most discussed aspect of the film, and it helped the documentary find an audience well beyond the usual nonfiction circuit. Running just over eighty minutes, it is compact, warmly received by critics on release, and often cited as one of the more striking American documentaries of its year.
Watching Some Kind of Heaven on Ktime
K-Time streams Some Kind of Heaven with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers have both options. You will need to log in with a free K-Time account to watch; reading this page costs nothing. The service is built in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora, and the film's eighty-one-minute runtime makes it an easy single-evening watch.