Project Detail

Better Or Worse?

Synopsis

Explores the world of 8 years-old Rachel as she embarks on a series of experiments in an attempt to understand her defective vision. Balancing the innate desire of an 8-years old to appear normal with the visual chaos of her everyday life, Better Or Worse? plays with notions of perspective both real and imagined through the motif of a diving board.

Details

Year: 2001
Type of film: Shorts
Running time: 9 mins
Format: 35mm
Director: Jocelyn Cammack
Producer: Caroline Cooper
Editor: Fiona Colbeck
Screenwriter: Jocelyn Cammack
Director of Photography: Alistair Cameron
Sound: John Avery
Principal cast: Finn Atkins (Rachel), John Langford (Mr Gray)

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

Lifesize Pictures

Contact: Caroline Cooper
The Workstation
15 Paternoster Row
Sheffield S1 2BX
UK

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At 101, Rose is a former journalist, sex-therapist and counsellor and now the oldest newspaper columnist in the world. Hetty, 102, is a veteran Stop-the-War campaigner, just about to embark on her 84th peace march; and Alison, 87, is a novelist and self-styled ‘establishment lady’ who was once a committed member of the Communist Party.<br /> <br /> Hetty, Rose and Alison are three of the oldest residents of the Mary Feilding Guild, a home for the ‘active elderly’, and regularly share their impassioned concerns on everything from terrorism to global warming, the rise of fundamentalism, and the decline of the media – not to mention the meaning of life, death and existence. But despite their unstoppable enthusiasm, humour and passion, all three women are not simply ready for death – they actively want to die.<br /> <br /> At the end of lives lived with passion and purpose, Hetty, Rose and Alison are facing the painful reality of physical, sometimes mental, deterioration and its consequences for their sense of identity and worth. In the singular community of the Mary Feilding Guild, they bring to the screen a rare perspective on old age. They are first-hand witnesses who have gone ahead and report back to us from the edge of their own mortality. They can tell us things of which no-one ever speaks.