Gracie Otto opens up about the moment she realised her father's mind was changing forever.

When director Gracie Otto turned the camera on her father, Barry Otto, in 2015, she was hoping to capture his creative process, to show how this renowned Australian actor could so vividly create a world from someone else's words.

Barry, known for his work in theatre as well as films like Strictly Ballroom and Bliss, was preparing to mount a performance of A Stretch of the Imagination, a classic Australian one-man play he had first performed in 1974. Gracie wanted to document it all, from the idea through to opening night.

Instead, she unknowingly documented the early stages of her father's cognitive decline.

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Mid-way through filming, Barry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behaviour. Rather than abandon the project, Gracie (who has directed shows including Bump, Heartbreak High, Deadloch and Ladies in Black) embraced this new direction as a way to highlight the reality of the disease and to preserve his memories. The result is Otto By Otto, a film that won Best Documentary at the 2025 AACTA Awards.

Filmed largely at his home in Petersham in Sydney's inner-west, the film offers a glimpse of Barry's eccentricities and creativity in the clothes he wears, as well as in the stacks of canvases and the clutter of beautiful antiques that fill the house ("I don't think there's a chair in the house you can actually sit on," Gracie said). Importantly, you also see his humour, even as the disease advances.

At one point toward the end of the film, while Gracie tries to remind him of the names of their family members, he asks her if he ever remarried after splitting from his first wife. Yes, and you're still married, she prompts him, to Sue (Gracie's mother).

Gracie and Barry, shot by Hugh Stewart. Image: Supplied

"Are we married?," he asks Gracie, incredulously, before bursting into laughter. "Oh, we're in deep sh** here."

Speaking to Mamamia's No Filter podcast, Gracie, 37, said it felt important to show the humour in the disease, the way in which tragedy and comedy run hand-in-hand.

"I don't want anyone to think that I would ever do anything to hurt Dad or show him not in the best light," she said, "but in my true heart I knew that he would find it funny, because he was still trying to make me laugh and still trying to engage in his funny way and not make it sad."

Inevitably, there is much of that, too.

When Gracie captures the second script reading for A Stretch of the Imagination, he struggles to find his place on the page or commit any lines to memory. This is long before his diagnosis, and the frustration is palpable. "F**king hell!" he curses himself. "The minute I look up from the script I don't know what's next…"

Then, in 2018, after he undergoes a hip replacement, we see the alarming, almost overnight deterioration triggered by the anaesthesia.

Gracie Otto with Krew Boylan on the set of Seriously Red, shot by Kane Skennar. Image: Supplied.

Barry is shown recovering in his hospital room, talking to his doctor about the "opening scene" taking place downstairs, about grants, scripts and the "good names" in the cast. He then offers to show the doctor some of his paintings in the "front room". In his mind, this unfamiliar, fluorescent-lit environment is a tangle of a movie set, a hospital, and his Petersham home. "Where am I?" he says. "This is not our house. This is not outside."

He was diagnosed a short time later. By then it was clear A Stretch of the Imagination was off the table.

"It was this awkward kind of thing where it was like this play is not going to happen, but I do want to still make the film of him, and I want him to be proud that he's in it," Gracie said.

"For me, I just want(ed) to capture everything about him, because it's going. It's going. I can see it just disappearing."

The final scenes were shot in 2020, and feature tender, happy moments in which he and Gracie exchange Christmas presents. 

"There was this push to keep filming, but the quality of life and the sadness about the disease— I feel like it ended at the right time," she said. "We got to the end of the film, and that was how I want to remember him."

Watching the deterioration since has been difficult. Gracie flew home from projects like Deadloch every few weeks to visit her family, and each time she found a part of him had ebbed away.

"It went from him being able to walk up the stairs to his bedroom, overnight, to my brother having to move his bed downstairs," she said. "I always say it's like 200 different light bulbs of everything you can do, and they just start to shut off, and you go, Oh, right. Great. Those 30 light bulbs just went off now."

These days, Gracie said, Barry doesn't walk well and rarely forms full sentences. He hadn't recognised her or her two siblings (brother Eddie, and their half-sister, actor Miranda Otto) for several years.

Gracie shot by Jake Terrey for SIDE NOTE. Image: Supplied.

"The only person he knows is Mum, and he gets so happy to see her," Gracie said. "She comes in and gives him a kiss, and he's like a little boy."

Gracie's mother cares for Barry at home, with the help of a nurse who visits him daily. Gracie said she had faced pressure, mostly from well-meaning friends, to place Barry in a care facility, but that the process of making Otto By Otto proved reassuring for her.

"I think she got to go back and look at when they met and their whole life together and have this understanding of why she's she's still going with this," Gracie said. "She's like, 'this is what I want to do', and you have to respect that that's what she wants to do with her life at the moment. She wants to take care of him."

It's taught Gracie things too.

"You only have one shot at life. You only have one time that you're going to be 36 and 37, 38 and 39, so I'm very about not wasting time and I'm always up for everything," she said.

She also hopes to honour one of her father's best qualities: kindness.

"People I work with on set, like a grip, might come past and go, 'I loved your dad. He was so kind to me when I was starting out,'" she said. "I just think it's such a nice legacy to be left with."

Read more of our No Filter interview stories:

• At 21, Ellie received routine blood test results. She thought her life was over.

• Tyler knew there was something unusual about her family. When her dad was arrested, she learnt the truth.

• Hannah once saw Andy as a trusted friend. Last year, she helped send him to prison.

Feature image: Getty/Hugh Stewart