2025 | Produced and directed by Sandra Luckow | USA | 107 minutes

Q&A with director Sandra Luckow following a sneak preview screening!

Free and open to the public!

Location: Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC) 101 (63 High St, New Haven, CT 06511)

Vanishing: A Love Story is a documentary about award-winning novelist Cai Emmons (Yale class of ’73) and her loving, open-hearted journey towards death. As she struggles to “do it right” and on her own terms, she creates powerful and lasting reminders that she was here. Vanishing represents a deeply personal journey, for Cai, her husband, Paul Calandrino and filmmaker, Sandra Luckow (Y’87, recipient of The Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts). The film is a continuation of Luckow’s creative practice of making intimate documentary portraiture of extraordinary people confronting challenging circumstances. This film pushes the boundaries of this approach to new levels of intensity with a one person crew, shooting on an iPhone X, drone piloting, animation and Respeecher, AI voice-to-voice technology, that allowed Cai Emmons to narrate the film posthumously using excerpts from her blog. One of the most challenging and important aspects of this film is Cai’s decision to schedule her “Death with Dignity” before ALS could rob her of the ability to self-administer, a legal requirement of the procedure. This film does not shy away from the difficult realities of her condition, her use of psilocybin, or the emotional complexities of her final days. Vanishing: A Love Story is not just a documentary about dying, but a profound exploration of life, love, and the courage it takes to face one’s mortality with dignity. As Cai tells us early in her story, “This is not going to be a grim film.”

Presented by the Yale Film and Media Studies