Filmmaker Statement
I came to Strathcarron Hospice with strict instructions: “Hang around.” 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! Myself, I was banned from the singing circle right in nursery school. 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 tunneling into the camera microphone. We started making little music films together, three minutes, five 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 learned 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.

Time is one of the greatest gifts someone can give you. When you sit with someone you are giving them your time. I spent four years filming in Strathcarron, listening, watching and taking up time from the patients and the staff. Sometimes there was a sense of urgency — if someone is in pain then each second of pain is a second too long. Sometimes time looped back on itself and we were transported by the songs back into someone’s childhood, or their first love, or the moment they lost their spouse. Julie, one of the patients who had been told she had months to live, lived firmly in the moment. As the moments stretched into months, and then years, she had a rethink. She dyed her hair blonde and went back to work, fell in love, got married. Is she scared of dying? Not anymore, she is ready. How long is a good marriage? How long is a long life? As Dorene says after her successful stem cell treatment, “This treatment has given me five years—and five years is a long time.”