This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
In 2015, two events happened around me almost simultaneously: in February, a colleague, who had become distant and increasingly bad at her job, was fired from our place of work – in six months she would be dead. A few days later a close friend was forced to put her father in a care home – he had just turned 60. A short time after this I saw a documentary that moved me like nothing had before. It followed a 65-year-old British man to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where, in the company of his wife of 40 years, he legally took his own life. The man in the documentary, my colleague, and my friend’s father all had versions of young-onset Dementia that had played out in very different ways. These experiences made me want to find out more about this disorder specifically, as well as the vital debate around end of life choices – one that still rages to this day in many countries around the world.
SUPERNOVA is the result of a lengthy and immersive research process. Over a three-year period, I worked closely with the UK’s leading dementia specialists at UCL and The Wellcome Trust and collaborated with many individuals and families affected by the condition. I have spent time with people who have since died both from dementia and suicide – in secret and in public - and seen the fallout from that at first-hand. It has been one of the most profound and important experiences of my life. The characters and themes in SUPERNOVA reflect my attempt to do these people and their stories justice in a truthful and original manner – to place a selfless, loving relationship in the context of an immediate future that hangs in the balance. From the outset, my desire was to make an empowering, powerful, challenging and time film about what we are willing to do for the people that we love.
SUPERNOVA is a romantic, original, modern love-story. It is an intimate, self-contained tale that investigates some of the biggest human questions of all: how we live and love and laugh, even as we near the end of our time.