Supported by online singing campaign #MYLASTSONG
www.sevensongsfilm.com
The Scottish Documentary Institute is proud to announce that its latest production Seven Songs For A Long Life will be released UK wide from the 2nd October to support Hospice Care Week (5-11 October) in association with Hospice UK.
The film will have its red-carpet World Premiere on the 2nd October at the 470 seater auditorium in MacRobert Centre in Stirling, Scotland, before screening in cinemas and community venues from Inverness to Brighton.
This is the first time that the leading UK palliative care organisations have come together to work on a public engagement project through film. They argue that Seven Songs for a Long Life provides a unique opportunity to change our experience of end of life. The film addresses the mismatch between our increasing scientific and medical capacity to maintain life after a terminal diagnosis, our rapidly snowballing average lifespan, and our anxiety around end of life. While the UK government is responding to this increasing longevity by adjusting pensions and worrying about how the NHS will cope, the general public are left to navigate a future that is more uncertain than ever before.
Seven Songs documents the lives of six day-care patients in Strathcarron Hospice, following them between home and hospice as they navigate their way through the end of a future that faces all of us. From the moment Tosh refuses to fill in his assessment form and serenades us with a remarkably good Sinatra song, this documentary grabs life through song. The patients allow us into tender, vulnerable and funny moments of their lives. Singing unlocks the patients’ pasts, guides their dreams and their futures. Encouraged by one nurse who loves to sing, and a collaborative filming process, they wrestle with the new insecurity facing us all: recent advances in biomedicine mean we can now live for years rather than months after a terminal diagnosis. Sometimes. But not every time. How do we cope with this uncertainty? Strathcarron’s patients are quirky, wry front-runners in a journey that we will all face.
Each patient deals with enormous change during the three years of filming. As they go through the little and big dramas of trying to make a will, medicating pain, finding a guardian for a child and moving house, we see the growing relationship between staff and patient, patient and patient. As the clinical director of Strathcarron, Marjory Mackay puts it:
“The patients possess certain knowledge – that a particular illness with which they have been labelled and whose assault they have felt deeply, will shape and shorten their life and will most likely expedite their death. Their hopes and dreams and all that we ordinarily take for granted about’ our tomorrows’ have been dashed. They have come face to face with the reality of their own mortality.
“By drawing us into their world of living while dying, they teach us what is possible if we embrace the tension of living in the knowledge that we are dying. There is no room for procrastination! But there is space for hope, for making the most of every opportunity, for cherishing everything that we have and focusing on the things that matter most. They show us their determination to face the reality of losses, even when they seem layered one on top of the other. They teach us not to like loss but to live with and through it – and in spite of it, retain dignity and strength and love for life.”
The UK wide release of this film not only offers the public a new and engaging film but also encourages us to consider individual autonomy over end of life decisions.
“80% of us say we want to die at home, but only a fraction succeed – most of us die in hospital, often against our dearest wishes.” (Amy Hardie)
Information alone does not change attitudes or fears. But the right film, in the right campaign, can have that impact.
Award winning director Dr Amy Hardie spent a year as filmmaker in residence in Strathcarron Hospice, making films with the patients and running family film-making workshops before developing the film into a feature documentary with financing from BBC Scotland, Creative Scotland, Bertha Foundation and Yle-Finland. Distribution Outreach is supported by Bertha Britdoc Connect fund and Docspace.
Director Amy Hardie said:
“Being an artist in a medical establishment you get good at hanging around. Feeling useless becomes your evolving art form. Finally the patients took pity on me. Maybe they were feeling a bit useless too. Disease can do that. Then they started singing to the camera. I loved it. But the songs that came from the patients at Strathcarron were so full of passion, dreams, anger, regret, acceptance…I felt it was their whole lives tunnelling into the camera microphone. We started making little music films together, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, interspersing the song with observational footage of their time in the hospice and at home.
The requests came in thick and fast and I learnt an interesting thing: when you’ve been told you have a disease that is going to kill you, you don’t waste time. And you want pleasure. To receive it and to give it. These are extraordinary moments, or maybe they are ordinary moments. Ordinary every day heroes. That’s as true for the staff as for the patients. It was a privilege to be allowed to ‘hang out’ for four years. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to help face your own mortality, making the process of dying itself safe, individual, and as gentle as possible.”
Leslie Finlay, Screen Officer at Creative Scotland, said:
“We are delighted to support Amy Hardie as her feature film Seven Songs For A Long Life receives its UK premiere on 2 October. Hardie is an exceptional filmmaker whose work contributes to a great tradition of documentary films from Scotland, making an impact in the UK and international documentary world.”
Heather Richardson, CEO of St Christopher’s Hospice said:
“This film offers fresh insights into the experience and challenges of living with a life threatening condition and the support that hospices can offer in response. It is beautifully made, and captures aspects of hospice care that often fail to be acknowledged in public literature or information about hospice services. Drawing viewers into the inner worlds of a group of people who are coming to the end of their lives, the film provokes an extraordinary range and depth of emotions in those who witness their progress and ultimately their demise…this could be the best Hospice Care Week initiative thus far.”
Barbara Munroe, the Chair of Palliative Care Leadership Collaborative said:
“This sensitive and thoughtful film conveys powerfully through its interwoven personal stories that we do not have to go through the journey to death alone. It is an invitation to us all to come together to share sadness, hurt and loss but also moments of simple pleasure and great happiness.”
Antonia Bunnin, Director of Hospice Support and Development, Hospice UK said,
“Seven Songs for a Long Life is a warm, funny, poignant and deeply moving film. It shows the power of human connection through song, and gently reveals many aspects of life for hospice patients and staff. We are delighted at Hospice UK to be working with the Scottish Documentary Institute to promote this film and we know that many hospices across the UK are screening the film during Hospice Care Week which takes place from 5 to 11 October 2015. Everyone who sees this film will be touched by it.”
For more information about the growing list of venues where SEVEN SONGS has already been booked, go to www.sevensongsfilm.com/screenings
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