New Oklahoma documentary 'Susan' chronicles Tulsan's battle with a rare form of dementia

Brandy McDonnell

The Oklahoman

July 12, 2025

In the decade since he was first introduced to Susan Suchan, Oklahoma filmmaker Russ Kirkpatrick has been continually surprised by the plot twists in his efforts to tell her story.

“Like any documentary, you start off thinking you're doing this, and you end up with this — and ‘Susan’ is no different,” Kirkpatrick said.

With his intimate film “Susan,” the Tulsa-based producer and director invites audiences into the life of Suchan, a fellow Tulsan trying to adapt to her confounding new existence after she is diagnosed with an uncommon form of dementia.

“What we initially thought that we had with Susan Suchan was someone who initially was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, which was an incorrect diagnosis. She was later re-diagnosed with this FTD, or frontotemporal dementia,” Kirkpatrick said.

“We thought, ‘Well, we're going to have a pretty simple beginning, middle, end. We'll just follow her for a number of years: Here she is in her current state, she's sliding, and now she's gone.’ It wasn't that at all.”

Where can Oklahomans see the new documentary 'Susan?'

After making its world premiere in June at Oklahoma City’s deadCenter Film Festival, “Susan” debuted in Kirkpatrick and Suchan’s hometown during the seventh annual Circle Cinema Film Festival.

“The Circle Cinema Film Festival highlights films made in, by, and for Oklahomans,” said Kerry Wiens, festival coordinator, in a statement. “Most films in the festival have a strong Oklahoma connection, whether the film was shot in Oklahoma or features current or former Oklahoma residents among filmmakers, cast, or crew.” The documentary "Susan" showed Sunday, July 13, as part of the Tulsa festival, and included a Q&A with the audience featuring Kirkpatrick and Susan’s daughters, Heather Miller and Emily Grace Shireman, who continue their mom’s legacy of advocacy.

“We’re super excited that we have distribution … at Circle Cinema. That is the start of multiple theaters that we will put it in, and beyond that, we'll go into streaming simultaneously on July 25,” Kirkpatrick told The Oklahoman during deadCenter. “We will start with transactional video on demand, and then within a year, we will have gone wide to everything from Tubi and Amazon to every imaginable streaming service.”

How did a Tulsa woman come to share a rare diagnosis with Bruce Willis?

In 2014, Kirkpatrick and Andy Kinslow launched Kirkpatrick & Kinslow Productions, a Tulsa-based production company. They quickly won a regional Emmy Award for their first film, “Boomtown: An American Journey,” a documentary about Tulsa’s history directed by Oklahoma moviemaker Bunee Tomlinson.

After the swift success of their “Boomtown,” the producers were introduced to Suchan by folks who thought her experiences might make a good follow-up film project.

“We spent quite a bit of time determining if she should be a person that we talked to and feature in a documentary. It probably took us about three months to get our heads around that, and ultimately, we decided we should do it,” Kirkpatrick said. “We ended up with an amazing character, a story that infuses humor into just absolutely the worst of life's circumstances.”

Suchan was ultimately diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia with primary progressive aphasia. Frontotemporal dementia refers to a rare group of cognitive disorders that occur when nerve cells in the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes are damaged.

Primary progressive aphasia affects nerve cells in the areas of the brain that affect comprehension and communication skills like language, speaking and writing.

In 2022, Primetime Emmy-winning actor Bruce Willis was diagnosed first with aphasia and then received an additional diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia the following year, according to his family.“What we wanted to showcase initially was, ‘This is what someone looks like (with this disorder) because she can articulate. We can get insight into her brain to understand what was going on.’ That's what we thought we were going to end up with,” Kirkpatrick said.

“It's a condition … where there's no reversal; there's no drug. There's not anything you can do but die.”

How did Susan Suchan's end-of-life plans upend filming on her documentary?

The documentary “Susan” delves into Suchan’s decision to sell her house and move in with her sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and Terry Weber. It chronicles her emergence as an advocate for FTD and the evolving relationship with her daughters, Heather Miller and Emily Grace Shireman, and grandchildren as she copes with the condition.

“We started off, and unbeknownst to us, she had set a date to end her life. She didn't tell her family, she didn't tell us, she didn't tell anybody — until she did. And then everything went kind of upside down. I was in the middle of the film's production. We had to really scramble to figure out how to continue. We had to get legal counsel to manage through that,” Kirkpatrick said.

“What we found out is that this is something that a lot of people who have these diagnoses talk about behind closed doors. … They all have these conversations about, ‘I really wish this could end, but there's no path for that. I'm not sure there should be a path for that.’”

The film culminates in a road trip to Florida, where Suchan and her family gather for a bittersweet beach vacation. “When people watch this film, (we hope) they can go sit down… at the dinner table, have a cup of coffee and say, ‘If this was me, what would we do?’” Kirkpatrick said.

“I think that's important: 55 million people around the world have dementia diagnoses. That's just the people with it. That's not the people who are their caregivers. So, it's beyond an epidemic. It's a massive problem, and hopefully this vessel, this vehicle, helps articulate what the issues are and moves the dialogue along.”