Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death (2017)

We don't know how. We don't know when. But death comes for us all. To be human is to wrestle with this truth and with the great unanswered question: How do we live with death in our eye? To borrow from Dylan Thomas (whose poem opens the film): Do we go gently or raging against the dying light? Or between these two extremes? Do we depart with equanimity or with anger? With clenched fists or more commonly with denial? Or do we see death as something to be fought and even possibly conquered, a challenge increasing pursued by some of the brightest scientific minds. Finally, what are the stories we tell ourselves as we go into the night - or into the light? "Awakening: Portraits of Life and Death" features fascinating, unexpected voices from various walks of life, old and young, believers and unbelievers, dying and healthy, well-known and obscure. For them death is no longer an abstraction. Whether through a dire prognosis, the imminence of their own death, the loss of a loved one, a sudden epiphany, or a temperament born to question, these are people who have truly 'awakened' to their mortality. The film is meant to raise ultimate questions, not to provide answers. How could it? Death is "that undiscovered country," as Hamlet so famously described it, "from whose bourn / No traveler returns."