Living In The Time Of Dying (Film Review)

‘Our world is trembling.’ These are the first words spoken in Michael Shaw’s film-doco Living in the Time of Dying.

With a title like that and with this as an opening line you might expect this film to be full of despair, doom, and hopelessness. But, it isn’t. It might be a stretch to say it is a joyful or happy film, yet there are glimpses of such feelings throughout the film.

One overriding emotion that does frequently arise is that of love.

Michael Shaw is an Australian filmmaker who, in order to make this film, sold his house and spent most of 2019 researching and interviewing four remarkable people for this film.

Catherine Ingram is a teacher of meditation and Buddhism. It is her words and voice that begin the film. She is well known as the author of Facing Extinction,¹ originally written in 2019 and updated in 2021 during coronavirus.

Dahr Jamail is an American journalist who has received awards for his writing about Iraq. However, it his book The End of Ice that is the reason for Shaw’s interest in interviewing him.

Jem Bendell, best known for his 2018 paper Deep Adaptation,² is Professor of Sustainability at Cumbria University. His paper has been downloaded more than one million times.

Stan Rushworth is a Cherokee elder and citizen of Chiricahua Apache Nation – an honour Stan says that cannot be refused, nor can it be requested – ‘it is a gift’ he says. He is the author of four books.

All four of these people bring a different, yet complementary, perspective to the topics of, social/environmental collapse, climate chaos, the 6^th mass extinction, overshoot, and the time of dying.

Shaw’s primary purpose in interviewing these four people, and in producing the film, is to attempt to answer the question; How do we live in the knowledge that the planet (including humans) is dying?

Shaw asks this question in various ways. When asking Stan Rushworth what traditional owners of the land could offer at this time, Stan is quick to remind Shaw, and the films viewers, that the message indigenous people have to offer is one they have ‘been saying…since Day One.’

Yet, westerners (colonisers of indigenous cultures) have not listened. Dahr Jamail reiterates this when he says ‘it is all about listening.’

This is a film about our values, about how we live with each other and the more-than-human beings on this planet. It is not a film about how much carbon is in the atmosphere or even about mitigation attempts. There are only two graphs in the film and no numbers. As such, this is a film that speaks more directly to our hearts than to our minds.

This film is less than an hour long. Spending an hour watching and listening to this film will reward you in many ways. It is available for free at https://www.livinginthetimeofdying.com/

Notes:

1. This essay is no longer available. As Catherine says about it: “I wrote the long-form essay “Facing Extinction” in early 2019.  Over these past years I have occasionally been able to update the information and perspectives contained therein. However, I am finding that the speed with which the data is changing and the pressing issues that we are immediately facing, such as the exponential rise of artificial intelligence and transhumanism, have made some of this essay obsolete.  I have thus decided to remove it.” There is, however, a Youtube video of the author reading the original essay still available.

2. Deep Adaptation is available on Jem Bendell’s website - https://jembendell.com/ - either by using the ‘Search” button or by scrolling to the bottom of his home page.