Arthur & Claire

Arthur, in his early fifties, has an incurable cancer and travels to Amsterdam to end his life at a clinic that provides assisted dying. There he happens to meet Claire, a woman in her thirties at the darkest point of her own life. As each tries to talk the other out of it, something turns: the person working to save someone else begins to see the worth of their own life again. Miguel Alexandre directed and wrote the screenplay with Josef Hader, working from Stefan Vögel’s play of the same name. The subject is heavy but the register is dry, leaning on a particularly Austrian humour that finds room to laugh without making light of dying. Josef Hader and Hannah Hoekstra play the two, in a German, Austrian and Dutch co-production.