Take Me Home: Liz Sargent & Ali Ahn on Caregiving, Autonomy and Building a Film Around Anna Sargent

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For writer-director Liz Sargent, Take Me Home began from something intensely personal: her relationship with her sister Anna Sargent and a belief in what becomes possible when the world is willing to adapt around someone rather than expecting them to adapt to it.

That philosophy became fundamental not only to the story Sargent wanted to tell, but to the way she made the film. Starring Anna alongside Ali Ahn, Take Me Home explores disability, caregiving and family through the daily realities of people navigating systems that frequently fail to provide the support they need.

“My love and belief in Anna has always been what this film was about,” Sargent explains. “It’s about how, if we shift the world around her, she can really reach her full potential.”

Through her work with Caring Across Generations, Sargent encountered the phrase “dignity of risk” — the idea that people with disabilities deserve the same opportunity to make choices, take risks and experience their consequences as anyone else.

But while Sargent learned the terminology later, the principle was already embedded in Take Me Home. Casting Anna as the film’s lead was never something she regarded as a creative gamble.

“That wasn’t a risk at all,” she says. “That was the most valuable part of the film.”

Caring Across Generations eventually became an important partner on the project, helping secure funding that allowed the production to build accessibility into the filmmaking process, including working with acting coach Tara MacIntosh.

The result was a set constructed around what Anna needed to succeed — something that ultimately transformed the process for everyone.

Ahn, who plays Anna’s sister Emily, found herself particularly energized by the freedom that created. Rather than expecting every moment to conform rigidly to the screenplay, the actors rehearsed extensively before remaining open to improvisation and discovery once the cameras rolled.

“You do all this prep and you work really hard, but at the end of the day you want to be present and alive to the person in the scene with you,” Ahn says.

Working opposite Anna demanded precisely that presence.

“There’s nothing fake about Anna,” she adds. “Anna also isn’t going to respond to anything fake, so you actually really have to level up to meet her dynamism.”

That responsiveness extended beyond performance and into the film’s visual language. Blocking, coverage and even the structure of scenes could change depending on what Anna discovered in a particular take.

For Ahn, that meant letting go of a concern actors are ordinarily trained to maintain: where the camera was in relation to her own performance.

“You lose vanity because it doesn’t matter whether the camera catches you,” she explains. “Did the camera catch Anna?”

Sargent describes the process almost as reverse engineering. The cast might begin with a structured improvisation, repeat it as the scene evolved and then identify the emotionally truthful moments they wanted to preserve. Only afterward would the production work out how to capture the necessary additional coverage.

That uncertainty became part of the film’s texture.

“I think that aliveness of uncertainty is what feels so real and in the moment for everyone,” Sargent says.

It also created an enormous challenge in the edit, with Sargent and editor Ian Holden sorting through extensive footage to find the emotional center of each sequence. Sometimes lines that had seemed essential on the page became unnecessary because a look, movement or physical tension communicated more.

The approach is particularly effective in establishing the physical familiarity between Anna and Emily.

Ahn recalls being careful not to manufacture that closeness, instead allowing Anna to determine what felt natural between them.

“I think it’s important for me to respect Anna’s autonomy and her space,” she says. “I tried to just let her guide me with what was comfortable.”

As their relationship developed, that comfort began appearing organically on screen — whether Emily is leaning against Anna or caring for her in one of the small, habitual ways that suggests years of shared history.

Other moments of intimacy emerged almost spontaneously. A quiet kitchen sequence between Anna and her father grew out of production complications while filming during an intensely hot Orlando summer, when storms repeatedly disrupted the schedule.

Rather than lose the day, Sargent gave the actors several actions and intentions and allowed them to improvise for roughly half an hour while two cameras captured what unfolded.

By that point in production, the relationships had become sufficiently developed that Sargent could simply allow the characters to exist together.

“They really developed a relationship,” she says. “We really just let it play out.”

While Anna remains the center of Take Me Home, the film simultaneously examines the interconnected nature of care within an entire family.

Emily has built a life for herself in New York, physically separated from her family in Florida, yet she remains deeply embedded in their support system. Her sister calls when she needs someone. Her parents rely on her. Financial pressures follow her across state lines.

For Sargent, her relationship with Caring Across Generations expanded her understanding of what caregiving actually encompasses.

“There are long-distance caregivers, and that is work and that is a support system,” she says.

It allowed the filmmaker to explore a dilemma she knows personally: loving your family deeply while simultaneously needing to pursue a life, community and ambitions of your own.

Ahn saw that contradiction as the foundation of Emily.

“Both can be true and coexist together,” she says. “All I had to do was invest in that ethical dilemma, and that to me is the heart of what I was trying to capture.”

The film refuses to offer Emily an easy solution. Her grief and exhaustion coexist with responsibility, leaving little room for her to process either. She becomes caregiver, case worker, emotional support system and daughter at once.

“Who takes care of the caregiver?” Ahn asks. “Where is that person’s release? Where do they go for rest?”

Take Me Home also places its family inside a larger system of health insurance, financial strain, waitlists and inadequate resources without turning those realities into exposition.

Instead, bureaucracy appears where it often does in real life: woven into mundane conversations, bills, prescriptions and decisions.

Sargent deliberately situated the story in Florida, where the particular circumstances surrounding disability and elder care become part of the pressure surrounding the family. Yet she was less interested in providing policy answers than encouraging audiences to question what resources are — and are not — available.

“It’s the humanity first always that’s going to change the way you think,” Sargent says. “Understanding the emotional pressures that this family has, I think, is the most powerful thing that we can do.”

Ahn similarly points to the way those systemic problems accumulate rather than arriving as one dramatic crisis. They are simply part of everyday life.

The effect is a film in which extraordinary pressure can exist inside otherwise ordinary days.

“That’s a Tuesday,” Sargent jokes of audiences who describe the film as difficult to watch.

“Welcome to real life in America when you don’t have the supports you need,” Ahn adds.

Ultimately, Anna and Emily are not positioned on opposite sides of the film’s central conflict. They are parallel characters seeking many of the same things: independence, agency, purpose and community.

Sargent was adamant that Emily could not simply return home and become the solution.

“I think it’s a really problematic thing to see women coming back to save the day,” she explains.

Both sisters love one another, but neither should have to surrender her own future for the other to have one.

That distinction becomes especially important when considering Anna’s future. Rather than asking why Emily cannot sacrifice more, Take Me Home asks a larger question: why should the family have to solve a systemic problem entirely by themselves?

“I hoped that the audience turns their eyes to wondering how the world could shift around us to create the solution,” Sargent says.

For Ahn, even the frustration some early viewers felt toward Emily for not simply returning home speaks directly to the assumptions the film wants audiences to examine.

“Why is it okay for us to expect self-sacrifice?” she asks. “Of course Emily wants to see her sister thrive and wants to be there for her, but even if she were to come home, is that actually the best thing for Anna?”

For Sargent, making Take Me Home ultimately transformed something born from isolation into an experience of community.

“It just came from a place of a lot of loneliness and the inability to control or understand this really tragic situation,” she says.

But telling the story introduced her to others who understood it: people with disabled siblings, caregivers and families confronting their own versions of the same questions.

Sharing those experiences, she says, “has really changed my life.”

“This is a universal experience and we should all talk about it,” Sargent says. “This is just a part of life, and in that sense we can feel empowered that we can change things.”

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