Testimony (2008)

When the clock starts ticking, what really matters? When death is at hand, what happens to creativity? Diagnosed with a brain tumour and with three more years to live, the Romanian-born director, Razvan Georgescu (38), takes issue with a tricky social taboo. The filmmaker sets out to explore the realm between life and death, in search of some of its most famous inhabitants across Europe and the US. He meets world famous artists willing to talk candidly about their own terminal illness or their traumatic brush with mortality. Can death and illness be a motor for creativity? Can creativity armour us against oblivion? Razvan Georgescu gets intriguing answers. The film starts on an operating table in Germany and follows the filmmaker on a very personal journey along Venetian canals, down Broadway, up Sunset Boulevard, coming full circle to Romania. Arresting, unsettling and surprisingly humorous, ‘Testimony’ rides a rollercoaster of emotions, in a series of encounters with artists hoping to stand the test of time: Jörg Immendorff the painter, Bill Viola the videoartist, Katherine Sherwood the painter, Peter Jecza the sculptor, William Filnn the Broadway musical composer, Remus Georgescu the Romanian composer. It is a film about finding beauty in the face of death, about the healing qualities of art. A road movie full of twists and turns that took three years to complete. It’s not about watching the body surrender to disease. It’s a film about life before death. It will make you think and it will make you laugh.