Till the End

Filmmaker Beatrice Perego admits that until recently she, unlike her good friend Martina, rarely thought much about death. Martina updates her will every year and now she’s even planning to stage her own funeral. Then, unexpectedly, it gets personal for Perego too, and Martina’s ritual helps her get over a major loss.

Till the End veers from the poetic to the down-to-earth; from the landscapes in which Martina wants to lose herself and the soft pink coffin floating on water, to the unfussy shots of the processes around the funeral—the casket makers, the bearers, the excavator—all accompanied in voice-over by personal recollections and revelations, a song and the final words. Drawing inspiration from Martina’s unconventional ceremony, Perego allows this calm, sensitively composed graduation film to evolve into her own ritual of farewell.