Eclipse Series 24: THE ACTUALITY DRAMAS OF ALLAN KING: KING, Allan: Dying At Grace (2003)

KING, Allan (Canada)
Dying At Grace [2003]
Eclipse Series 24
DVD

An extraordinary, transformative experience, Allan King's Dying at Grace is quite simply unprecedented: five terminally ill cancer patients allowed the director access to their final months and days inside the Toronto Grace Health Centre. The result is an unflinching, enormously empathetic contemplation of death, featuring some of the most memorable people ever captured on film.

148 minutes

Color

Stereo

1:77:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2010

Director

Allan King was 73 when he directed Dying at Grace.

Other King films in the Collection:

Eclipse Series 24: Warrrendale (1967)
Eclipse Series 24: A Married Couple (1969)
Eclipse Series 24: Come On Children (1972)
Eclipse Series 24: Memory For Max, Claire, Ida And Company (2005)

The Film

After three decades, King returns to his actuality dramas with digital video to the Toronto Grace Health Centre to film five human beings who are dying.

Looking back on his previous documentary — Come on Children — it is not that difficult to make the substitution of 10 relatively healthy teenagers to their final days.

Caremla, Joyce, Eda, Lloyd and Rick are near death. King’s cameras record it all — the hallucinations, the tortured sound of gasping and rasping last breaths — and even captures the last breath of a few.

Rick was a heroin addict for 40 years, and is dying of lung cancer. They let him smoke.

There is much praying and friends and relatives tearfully whispering of going to a better place, where at least their final agonies will turn into eternal peace. There is one unbeliever, who states that she looks forward to nothingness.

**

Thus, the film is a construct of faith and belief. Nothing wrong with that, except that the viewer must sit through 148 minutes of it all. It could have been edited.

Film Rating (0-100):

82

By Director
By Spine #