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Working at the University of Liverpool alongside Julia Hallam and Lisa Shaw, and in the Department of Music, are Sara Cohen and Jacqueline Waldock. Both Sara and Jacky have led projects that engage with and support local organizations and communities, and examine music from the perspective of those involved. In fact, it was their shared interest in how ‘ordinary’ people engage with and experience music in everyday life that prompted them to join forces in 2014, and start working together on community engagement projects. At the same time, they have brought to these projects their own individual research interests and expertise. In this chapter, we discuss their recent collaboration on a project that explores the use of music to improve the wellbeing of older people in the UK, including people living with a dementia-related cognitive impairment and in nursing homes and health-care settings, and those who live independently but are cared for at day-care centres run by voluntary and community-based organizations. We situate this project within a selection of UK music initiatives or ‘interventions’ aimed at helping those living with dementia and age-related memory loss, and outline how specific projects informed our own approach and work.

This chapter explores three different Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing pilot projects, two of which were carried out in Liverpool and the other in Petrópolis, a city of comparable size in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It begins by discussing our motivations for developing these projects and how we drew on our previous research relating to films and cinema-going. It then presents the three different projects, showing how each was tailored to the care context in question (a residential nursing home and a day-care centre on Merseyside, and a GP practice in Brazil), explaining how they were conducted and discussing the results, with a view to informing and improving future initiatives of this type. We also show how our findings have shaped the creation of the ‘best-practice’ toolkit designed to enable activities coordinators, carers and health professionals to optimize the benefits of using films to stimulate memories and reminiscence and promote an improved sense of wellbeing among older people and those living with dementia. (This toolkit is available to download from the Emerald website in English: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Selfies/?K=9781787437173). We recount in detail our practical experiences of setting up and running screenings in diverse environments, how we set about trying to ‘measure’ or at least gather some tangible evidence of the wellbeing benefits of these events, and provide numerous examples of the reminiscences that they generated, as well as the feedback on the projects that we received from both the people who participated and the people who care for them.

Wesley Snipes has had an extensive career on the big screen starting out as part of the New Black Cinema movement in the 1990s working with Spike Lee and Mario Van Peebles. His roles have been incredibly varied covering drama, comedy, action, thriller, horror and Science Fiction: he has played everything from jazz saxophonist to paraplegic and drag queen to vampire, as well as recently appearing as character actor D'Urville Martin in Eddie Murphy's critically acclaimed Dolemite Is My Name. However, despite his versatility as an actor and his popularity in action films such as Demolition Man and the Blade Trilogy, Snipes has been, surprisingly, the subject of minimal analysis unlike, for example Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Unfortunately, he has also fallen foul of the direct to video curse from around 2005 as well as being sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion. However, this should not negate Snipes' contribution to cinema, especially in the genre of action. Snipes can be a commanding presence given the right script and direction – as an expert martial artist he is lithe and agile; he has strong facial features and a powerful voice, plus the ability to deliver the wisecracking humour which often goes hand-in-hand with action performances. The aim of this chapter, then, is to focus on Snipes as an action star and, more specifically, his significance as a black action star, examining several key films which have helped to develop his onscreen persona and performance style.