She’s Saying ‘Thank You,’ Grandma

Director Jan Oxenberg says her new film, “Thank You and Goodnight!,” is “for everyone who wishes they could see someone one more time.”

Oxenberg’s irreverent, touching and often funny documentary is a loving tribute to her feisty grandmother Mae Joffe, her valiant battle with cancer and how Grandma Mae’s death affected the family.

Oxenberg, Grandma, her mother, brother, friends and even the family dog populate the movie. The film’s “narrative voice” is supplied by a cardboard cutout version of a 5-year-old Jan.

“I always knew I didn’t want to make a conventional documentary,” Oxenberg says. “Partly because when you are dealing with such a complex and emotional subject as family love and death, you have to go deeper than just putting an event on the screen.”

The film, Oxenberg says, just like her grandmother, attempts to laugh in the face of death. “The night before my grandmother died,” Oxenberg recalls, “she joked with me I should follow her to heaven and I should bring the camera.”

Oxenberg began the film in 1979 and completed it 12 years later. It’s currently playing at Laemmle’s Monicas theater in Santa Monica.

“I like to say it sort of passed through the realm of the pathetic and entered the realm of the heroic,” she says with a laugh. Obtaining financing was next to impossible. “It became a joke. How can you make a film that has every buzzword that would make people think they don’t want to see it? It was a challenge.”