Deserving Best Film winner at the 2006 Phoenix Film Festival, Andrew Jenks, Room 335 begins as an interesting summer project and evolves into a profound treatise on aging. Nineteen year old NYU film student Andrew Jenks decides to spend 36 days living in a Florida assisted living facility, bringing fellow filmmaker friends Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew and William Godel along to digitally record a video diary of his stay. Jenks' therapist fears that this isn't such a hot idea, but Jenks insists that he feels he can learn about Life from the elderly and that they share the same "outcast" situation.

While Jenks may be different from the average young college student, he is anything but a misanthropic geek. His engaging, caring, sincere personality connects rapidly with a number of the patients, and its their openness and transparency that makes Jenks' project such a noteworthy film. By the end of the well-paced film's 90 minutes, you'll feel like you know these people intimately and consider them friends.

Most engaging is 96-year old Tammy, an energetic woman who's outlived her family and original friends but has such a great sense of humor (often R-rated) and caring nature that she's continually making friends at the Harbor Place facility. She also serves as sage and angel. Even when she faces a health challenge and is admitted to a hospital, Tammy continues to be far more concerned for her friends than for herself.

After observing taciturn Bill constantly doing favors for various residents and taking daily walks to the store to buy candy for them, Jenks deliberately sets out to get to know him. They become buddies. A former Marine who wears only Hawaiian shirts, Bill exchanges "hurrahs" and playful roughhousing punches with Jenks. The 80 year old also talks more on camera than he had publicly uttered previously at the facility. Quite a prankster, Bill is shown "stealing" another patients walking cane and turning it into a baseball bat; his teasing behaviors signals how intensely he likes a person. Never verbally eloquent, Bill's body language reveals his feelings, and Jenks correctly interprets Bill's sudden silent treatment near the end of the filming--Bill is upset that his new young friend is about to leave.

Other significant characters include legally blind and hard of hearing Libby, who has a bit of a temper that balances her caring, sweet side, and her fellow Jeopardy devotee Dotty, whose heath radically deteriorates. Dotty has the film's most heart wrenching scene and profoundly affects Jenks, and us in turn. And that is the film's greatest strength—the raw humanity that it uncovers, running Life's roller-coaster ride that ranges from laughter to poignancy to grief.

The filmmakers collected some 200 hours of raw footage that they deftly edit and enhance effectively with non-intrusive narration and musical score. By inference, we realize that Jenks has been very selective by focusing on a handful of the most responsive residents. He includes a late night telephone call back home to New York, despairing that he might have made a mistake in taking on the project, as so many have dementia. We see very little of that aspect--the exception hauntingly occurs during a blackout when staff people are curiously absent while a confused patient helplessly wanders the hallway and another struggles to breath without oxygen.

That's the only scene that could be interpreted as a critique of assisted care facilities, along with Tammy's astute observation that the main reason that we see almost no one except old white people here isn't due to racism. She asserts that African Americans and other minorities take care of their grandparents through their extended families. She also muses that previous generations of white people never constructed these facilities for the same reason; times have changed.

But Andrew Jenks, Room 335 is no political treatise on assisted living facilities. It's a surprising character study that serves as a warm portrait of an often neglected aspect of humanity. The fact that it's often so raw--cameramen and sound equipment is often shown along with the intended subjects--is a part of the film's charm, a modified "direct cinema" that intimately involves the filmmakers with their subjects. And for this film, that is completely appropriate. Jenks reveals as much about himself as his new friends at the Harbor Place facility, so viewers will eagerly look forward to his next project. When a good hearted director makes a film that is as entertaining and moving as this one, he bonds with the audience.