Butterfly is a short film that follows a single day in the lives of a mother living with dementia and the daughter who cares for her. It stays quiet and close, without dramatizing anything.

In the film, the mother is played as a child of about ten years old. She crouches in a flower bed chasing butterflies, layers on clothes even on hot days, and looks out the window instead of answering when she is called. The roles have quietly reversed: the daughter now watches over her mother the way a parent watches a small girl. This is the mother as her daughter sees her, placed directly on screen, so the film never has to name the illness or explain it in dialogue. It simply shows where the two of them now stand with each other.

The butterfly is what remains of the mother's world, the last sense she can still reach. It is also a way of picturing memory: the harder you try to hold it, the further it moves away. Nothing lands, nothing stays. Through that movement, the film says that dementia is a long goodbye, one that arrives well before death does.