Waiting for the ferry

Abstract

In an early scene that sets the tone in Steven Eastwood's latest documentary, Island, we see a body lying in an open casket. The filmmaker spent a year in 2015–16 filming four patients receiving palliative care at the Earl Mountbatten Hospice on the Isle of Wight, UK. Destined never to see the finished product, Alan and Mary in their 80s, Roy in his 70s, and Jamie, just 40, all had terminal cancer. Without narration or descriptions of their precise illnesses, the camera lingers (seemingly too long sometimes) on the patients during home visits, in hospital corridors as the medicine trolley is wheeled around, and as the patients are attended to by nurses. We see them being visited by loved ones, watching television, eating, and, in Alan's case, being assisted to finish a cigarette by the filmmaker himself. We see Jamie at his own fundraising social.