Still Life

Still Life is a 2013 drama film written and directed by Uberto Pasolini. The film was presented at the 70th Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Director in the category "Orizzonti". At the Reykjavik International Film Festival, Still Life received the top award (Golden Puffin) as well as the FIPRESCI Award. It also received the Black Pearl award (the highest award) at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival for "its humanity, empathy and grace in treating grief, solitude and death"; for his performance, Eddie Marsan won the Best British Actor award at the 2014 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Plot John May is a man struggling with loneliness who works the Bona Vacantia office in the Kennington Town Hall in London, where his main responsibility is locating the next of kin of people found dead in the district with no will and testament. Most cases are open-and-shut due to lack of leads, but when heirs are located, he often finds them hesitant to organise funerals for the deceased and so has taken to the practice of organising the funerals, writing eulogies for each deceased and attending the funerals himself, usually as the only mourner. His boss finds this practice time-consuming and expensive and so has decided to close his office down once he completes one final case: the death of William "Billy" Stoke. When Mr. May, as he is called throughout the story, asks the man's address, he finds out that the deceased was a neighbour he never knew, who lived directly across the apartment building from him, in direct view of his window. Inspecting Stoke's apartment, his sole lead is a series of photographs, one of them being of a pork pie factory. Most of the photographs are of an adult woman and a young girl. The many photos of the young girl stop abruptly; there are empty pages in the album and no photos of a girl much older than ten. John surmises that Stoke once had a wife and daughter, but there are no records or leads, no names, dates or labels, no identification of any kind. He visits the pie factory and finds one of the workers who was friends with Stoke at the time. He asks the man if he had ever spoken of a wife or daughter to which the man replies that Stoke had never spoken of a family and that he left the factory for a lady who owned a fish and chips restaurant that Stoke frequented.