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Across the water on the island, four individuals experience the year in which their lives will end. Illness progresses, relationships gently shift, and we are witness to rarely seen and intensely private moments. One person shares their acceptance of death, whilst another is surrounded by a community in shock. We observe bedside care and the rhythm of breathing. In a pathology lab, microscopic biopsies in close-up show the interior of bodies, our biology.
Filmed over 12 months on the Isle of Wight, Island is a life-affirming reflection on the phenomena of dying, portraying the transition away from personhood and observing the last days and hours of life and the moment of death. Like the ferries cyclically arriving and departing in this an enigmatic landscape, the film appears buoyant, afloat. Death is shown to be natural and everyday but also unspeakable and strange.
Screening is followed by a Q&A with the director.
Directed by Steven Eastwood. Produced by BAFTA nominated WFTV 2017 factual award winner, Elhum Shakerifar
Running time 90’ | Cert 15 | Hakawati and Paradogs Films
★★★★ ‘HAUNTINGLY EVOCATIVE’ The Guardian
★★★★★ ‘A memento mori in a pretty direct form’ The Sunday Times
‘Disarmingly intimate’ Sight and Sound
For more information about this film: www.islandfilm.co.uk
This event is included in our Thursday Lates offer: book your ticket for the event together with admission for Is This Tomorrow? and save £4.95/£1.50 concs, plus receive a free drink at the Whitechapel Refectory.
Steven Eastwood is an artist-filmmaker whose work has screened and exhibited internationally. He has completed two feature length films, Island (LFF, Rotterdam 2017/18) and Buried Land (officially selected for Tribeca, Moscow and Mumbai Film Festivals in 2010). His recent solo show The Interval and the Instant was at Fabrica Brighton. Eastwood is Professor of Film Practice at Queen Mary University London.
Elhum Shakerifar is a BAFTA nominated producer and recent recipient of the BFI Vision Award, producing and distributing documentaries through her company Hakawati with the core ethos that a good story is all in the telling. Recent credits include winner of the BIFA for Best Documentary Almost Heaven (Carol Salter, 2017) and BFI/Sundance funded Even When I Fall (Sky Neal and Kate McLarnon, 2017). In 2015, she self-distributed her BAFTA nominated production A Syrian Love Story (Sean McAllister, 2015) in the UK to such high visibility that it was named #3 Best Film of 2015 by the Guardian.
