Watching ‘Island’, a film by Steven Eastwood, at the Rotterdam Film Festival left me speechless. And with many tears, as I was crying even when the film finished and during the whole Q&A.
What captired me the most is watching the process of dying, that mostly take about a year, in 90 minutes. It helped me revisit the journey I took with some of beloved one and process it with a distance. But oh so close.
Death is not a subejct we use to talk about or look at, not so closly as Eastwood takes us. Or as in the words of the newspaper, Independent* :
“Most of us have very little knowledge of the process of life ending, physically and emotionally, until it comes suddenly into our own experience. The fact that we will die is as certain as the fact that we are born, and yet we repress this eventuality, in Western culture at least. Death and dying remains partitioned, not widely shared, shown or talked about.
And because of this, death is one of the least accessible and malleable subjects for art and non-fiction film. It is as though the image of dying is not something we should see, or even want to see. As a consequence, there is very little filmmaking done with the consent and collaboration of the dying person and there are few moving images of the very end of life.”
*http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/island-steven-eastwood-bfi-london-film-festival-a7979466.html
