Yili Xinhuo Releases Alzheimer's Caregiver Short Film on World Alzheimer's Day

Yili Xinhuo (伊利欣活), in partnership with Shanghai Memory Café (上海记忆咖啡馆) and the China Elder Care Foundation (中国老龄事业发展基金会), launched a short film campaign on September 21 — World Alzheimer's Day — to draw public attention to the family caregivers of Alzheimer's patients across China.

The film is built around real caregivers, whom the campaign calls "forgotten temporary extras," a reference to the group-performance (群演) framing used throughout. Each subject narrates their experience of repeatedly assuming different identities — spouse, stranger, parent, child — as the patients they care for lose their memories. The staging mirrors their actual daily caregiving reality, with caregivers enacting scenes drawn from their own lives rather than scripted roles.

The campaign went live on WeChat on September 22, accompanied by an offline activation at the Memory Café in Shanghai. The central tagline is: "Memory may fade, but love will not disappear."

The effort draws on a significant domestic context: China has approximately 17 million Alzheimer's patients and an estimated 40 million family caregivers — a population whose emotional and physical burden rarely receives sustained public focus.

The campaign reflects a pattern emerging among Chinese consumer health brands of anchoring emotional storytelling to officially recognised awareness dates, using real subjects rather than actors to lend documentary weight. With 40 million caregivers as a latent audience, the framing addresses a group whose scale is enormous but whose everyday experience has historically been absent from mainstream brand communication.