Shooting a real death is a line cinema rarely crosses. Steven Eastwood, whose new documentary follows hospice patients confronting their final days, explains why this squeamishness does us a disservice
If you watch movies you’ll have seen umpteen deaths, sometimes in a single film. (According to the people who keep a tally of such things, the final Lord of the Rings has cinema’s highest body count, of more than 800 – though presumably that includes orcs.) But what about the dying process itself? What happens to a body that is dying? A taboo-breaking new documentary filmed inside a hospice on the Isle of Wight controversially features a seven-minute scene of the final moments of Alan Hardy, a retired north London bus depot manager.
Island is directed by the artist and film-maker Steven Eastwood. It started life as an installation commissioned by the Fabrica Gallery in Brighton. Eastwood spent 12 months at the Earl Mountbatten Hospice in Newport between 2015 and 2016, working with terminally ill patients, four of whom appear in the film. What’s so dramatic about the footage of Alan’s death is how undramatic is. I don’t know what I was expecting, a deathbed scene like the movies, perhaps: Alan mustering a few profound last words to make sense of it all, or a glimmer in his eyes as life flashes before him.
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