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How To Die

Role: Director, Producer, Writer
Status: In post-production 

Editor: Kara Blake, Sofia Bohdanowicz 

We don’t in fact need a terminal diagnosis in order to deeply contemplate and befriend the presence of our death; but that’s what so many of us wait for.
-Stephen Jenkinson

How do we reconcile ourselves to terminal illness – and what resources do we have to draw on, when we find ourselves unprepared ?

How to Die is an intimate, character-driven film, woven through with elements of animation. It takes us behind the scenes of a pioneering study exploring how psilocybin-assisted therapy can change the experience of hospice patients suffering from demoralization, as they approach end of life.

Filmed over the course of two years, the film witnesses the journey of 3 patients, capturing their emotions, doubts and fears – then following them through the study, their psilocybin journey and integration, exploring what’s changed for them, what insights they’ve gained. Full access to recordings of patients’ sessions with researchers – their therapy meetings before and after dosing, and the dosing sessions themselves – invites us to witness patients’ experience up close, with revealing and heartbreaking results.

How to Die has elements of a meditation – inviting us to slow down, breathe and contemplate our own relationship with mortality. At the film’s core are intimate observational scenes with our characters – avoiding talking heads/sit-down interviews, shot and edited more like a narrative film. As much of the film is about their feelings, questions and inner experience, the visual treatment uses hand-drawn, multimedia layers of animation to bring to life these interior worlds, adding a layer of existential questioning, with moments of dark humour.

The film, and the study, arrive in the context of the current “psychedelic renaissance” – a wave of enthusiasm and openness to these medicines not seen since the 1960s/70s, in the wake of Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and others. At the same time, How to Die aims to address questions that are more existential, philosophical, and timeless. How do we approach our own mortality, what’s our relationship to our own death – even before we’re dying? How do we deal with suffering; could there be something to be learned from the insights and struggles of people so close to end of life?