“I think I may be dying”

Filmmaker Simon Chambers finds his life drastically interrupted when he is called back to London from India to care for his retired gay actor Uncle David. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong.

Chambers finds humor and humanity in the final act of his uncle’s life in his IDFA award-winning documentary Much Ado About Dying

Release Date

Directed by Simon Chambers, Much Ado About Dying premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) where Chambers won the IDFA Award for Best Directing; and will have its US theatrical premiere on Friday, March 15 at Film Forum in NY, followed by Los Angeles on Friday, March 22 at Laemmle’s Monica Film Center, with a wider national expansion to follow in select markets.

Synopsis

When the filmmaker Simon Chambers receives an email from his elderly gay uncle — “I think I may be dying” — he takes it as a summons. As it turns out, eccentric Uncle David, a retired actor living alone in a cluttered, mouse-infested London house, is being dramatic, sort of: For the next five years, Chambers both cares for and documents him, through all his performative exuberance (acting out passages of Shakespeare), anarchic charisma (swinging from boisterous humor to short temper), and physical/mental challenges. Their lives become encumbered by inadequate public and private eldercare support systems. Coping with hospital visits, a house fire, and a cancer diagnosis, the younger man (also single and queer) reflects with aching honesty on what may await him in the years to come.

Reviews

Variety reviewed the film at at IDFA, writing, “Amid the old man’s turmoil — and moments of joyous clarity, as when singing along to Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” — it’s Chambers’ churning sense of guilt and helplessness behind the camera that gives his film its conflicted, ever-heavier heart, alongside the fear that he may be documenting a preview of his own later years. A quiet, reserved figure who at one point claims to have “gone back into” the closet he left as a younger man, the filmmaker tends to his uncle’s maddening whims with a bittersweet empathy that borders on panic, as if investing the care in him that he hopes to receive from someone else one day. Death isn’t an ending in this achingly funny-sad film, just an anxiety passed between loved ones.”

Official Trailer

Watch the official trailer for Much Ado About Dying