When I tell someone that I am currently working on a film about a palliative care unit, the response I nearly always receive is a shocked: “Oh God, are you really doing that to yourself?”
Actually, my first impetus to make this film was an impulse to examine my own fear of death. One of my uncles died in hospice care after a long, difficult illness – but until the very end, he never lost his courage to face life and his cheerfulness and he examined very consciously how he wanted to spend his final months. Of course, he was one generation older than me. Nevertheless, it really made me think about how differently I deal with the topic.
In my research, I soon understood something that will hopefully become clear in the film as well. In the palliative care unit, it is far less about dying than it is about life. It is a matter of helping gravely ill patients to find a way to deal with their own death and to fill their remaining time with as much quality as possible, to live the final phase of their life consciously. Therefore, I too see my film more as a film about life than about death.
At first, I was unsure whether it would be possible to capture the extremely intimate conversations and situations on camera.
The path from the idea to the shoot was a long one. The first two palliative care units that had already more or less agreed were called off again by the hospital management. In the end, the Franziskus Hospital confirmed and I was about to start shooting – than came Covid.
As the project could finally move forward several years later, I was at first still unsure if it would be possible to capture the extremely intimate conversations and situations on camera. But from the first moment on, I received considerable trust from the team at the ward. Surely, it also helped that I was there alone, with my camera. And they quickly noticed that somebody was deeply interested in their work. Consequently, strong trust on both sides was created. The patients surely felt this too.
It was a huge effort to finish this film completely alone. Only after the editing was finalized did the sound mix and colour grading crew members join. On the other hand, I think that I could only have made this film in this way – without a budget, but therefore with total artistic freedom.
Philipp Döring
