Still Life is inspired by your own experience, so how difficult was it to take something so deeply personal and transform it into a story that could be shared with an audience?

Um, well, it wasn't actually too difficult.

Uh, it was actually rather therapeutic, I'd say.

Um, yeah, so I had a stillbirth in 2020, and so the short film, um, is a kind of, yeah, take on what happened to me and my husband.

Um, it's, um...

After, uh, we lost Dexter in 2020, we went into lockdown, and I started to write down, there were all these kind of absurd and bizarre situations happening as, as it does after something traumatic.

Um, you know, obviously, I, it was a very heartbreaking experience, but yeah, we just found ourselves in certain situations that if I didn't laugh, you know, I'd just forever be crying.

Mm-hmm.

For example, Kate always makes me think of the little knitted square that that we used i wonder if you could talk a bit about that but that definitely feels like something that if someone has been through a stillbirth they'll connect to that detail in the film and feel like it's very genuine

Yeah, Sophie said there are lots of little kind of nods and Easter eggs in there that if you've been through it, you really do get it.

And so one of those, for example, in the flashback to the stillbirth where they're holding the baby, the very sort of beautiful shot, Ophelia is actually holding this little knitted blue blanket and And that was actually Dexter's blanket.

So when we, my waters broke early at 22 weeks and basically he was still alive and kicking, kicked a lot actually.

And we were in hospital for another two weeks, sort of.

The baby can survive without their water, so it was all about kind of keeping him inside for as long as possible.

They then had to induce him because his infection markers were rising.

What is the conversation you hope that this film sparks around this very difficult topic?

What are your thoughts on that conversation piece afterwards for the film?

That was the actual reason we made the film was to start that conversation about baby loss.

When Dexter died, he died in 2020.

And we did go into our first lockdown, which was hard.

But I remember the feeling of loneliness was like all consuming.

And I was just scrabbling around to try and find other people who had been through something similar.

And that was the main aim of making this film was to help people understand in that similar position who felt feel lonely to realize they're not alone it's very common those feelings of people saying the wrong thing doing the wrong thing when we were filming it was really interesting how many of the cast and crew had been touched by baby loss in one way or another and people do start talking about it more which is great so what i would say to people after you watch it is just don't be afraid to have those conversations Silence actually speaks more volumes.

Were there any great ones that you saw where you thought they handled it well? And then you don't have to name the films, but were there ones that you saw on this topic that you thought, wow, you really didn't capture it? And why do you think they didn't do a good job of capturing what it felt like?