As I Live
& Breathe

Her family will cross oceans for a funeral, but not her birthday. So Vicky and her best friend Efia build the one invitation nobody can decline. Reverend Janet Brodie is given an eleven-page binder. The sailing club is turned into a memorial venue. Every chair is named. Every guest receives a black-ribboned envelope. There is live recorder music, a running order, a white birthday cake, black balloons and a giant photograph of Vicky smiling down at the room while the living woman waits next door.

Phones are surrendered. Jägerbombs are consumed. The rules prohibit lies, omissions and the polite versions of family history everyone has agreed to live with. Chairs move. Envelopes open. Confessions begin. Caleb performs a barefoot wushu form. The room gets funnier, stranger and more dangerous as Vicky’s immaculate ceremony starts producing truths she did not entirely expect and cannot control.

Then Fiona Haldane arrives from the Registration Office with one boring fact: there is no record that Vicky Calder is dead.

The proceedings end. People begin collecting coats, stacking chairs and clearing plates. Vicky hears the room emptying and walks out alive, hoping to help clear up. The family finally gets to answer her back. Some of what she exposed was true. Some of it was cruel. Some of it was never hers to tell. The authority of the dead woman disappears the moment she becomes a living person again.

As I Live & Breathe is not about whether Vicky can successfully fake her own death. It is about the gap between making people attend and making them stay. A lie can assemble a family. It cannot repair one. Once the room breaks, Vicky is left with the thing she was avoiding from the beginning: asking plainly for company and accepting that the answer might be no.

Her death gets them home. Can she learn how to ask them to stay?

Families are full of people doing damage in the name of love. Sometimes the love is real. Sometimes the damage is real. Sometimes one has nothing to do with the other.

AS I LIVE & BREATHE is about the impossible arithmetic of care: who gave more, who stayed, who left, who was needed, who became exhausted by being needed, and how easily protection becomes control. It is about people who can say terrible, complicated things but still cannot say the simple things until circumstance gives them permission: i needed you. i was frightened. i was angry. Please stay.

The island matters. Everyone has to sail to get here. Arrival is already a decision. Leaving is an action. The ferry, the harbour, the road down to the sea and the small rooms people borrow for a few nights all give physical shape to a family that has spent years moving towards and away from one another.

And I want to make a feature.

That is the prize. Not because a feature is automatically more important than a short, but because when the right story arrives, it is worth the sustained work required to build a whole world, live with these people for a while and make something large enough to contain & explore contradiction.

This is that story.

It is funny, sad, specific and ordinary. Nobody is a monster. Nobody is entirely innocent. They hurt each other, make each other laugh, carry each other’s bags, tell lies, eat cake and keep trying.

That feels worth spending a year making.