Title: Permanent End
Genre: Documentary.
Format: MiniDV.
Aspect Ratio: 16:9.
Run Time: 12 mins, 44 secs.
Release Date: June 2006.

- Click here to hear Audio Preview 01
- Click here to hear Audio Preview 02
- Click here to hear Audio Preview 03

- Click here to download a PDF of the press pack for ‘Permanent End'.
- Click here to see a gallery of images related to the production.


Synopsis: A documentary about the different views that young adults from various cultural backgrounds hold concerning death. Taking the form of a series of interviews, the documentary examines life through the framework of death, while also dealing with life after death, and of course death itself. Notions such as heaven, hell, reincarnation and indeed the purpose of talking about death are discussed, and in many cases scrutinized and dismissed.

Director's Statement:
In the third year of my undergraduate degree programme in Film and Video, there was a module entitled the ‘Independent Project', in which we could do as we pleased, as long as we worked on the film either alone or in small numbers. While I was still in my second year, I began to think about possible themes and ideas which I could use for the project. At the time, I was finishing work on a short film entitled ‘Answers', in which I was exploring the idea that the meaning of life can only be found in death. As I began to brainstorm, I realised that I was still fascinated by the notion of death, and, more specifically, the human conception of it. I became convinced that death was the theme that my ‘Independent' should take, but I realised that any film I wrote around it would be heavily informed by my own views. As a result, I began to film interviews with people from different cultural backgrounds in order to contrast and compare the different views held by these people. Although my initial plan was to interview people from different age groups, this idea was quickly streamlined once I realised that people in young adulthood would in fact provide the best interviewees for what I was trying to achieve: there is a big difference between philosophising about death and actually facing it, and thus people who are old enough to have realised what their life is actually about (or at least what it is), but who are yet to have lived it for a sufficient time, are ripe for exploring the notion of death in a meaningful yet abstract sense (although this is not to say that I will not return at a later date to the same questions, concerns and ideas with an older age group). The answers given in each of the interviews were fascinating, and common themes and ideas soon became apparent, and indeed some of the themes and ideas found their way into the script for my film ‘…'. But I realised that as well as being interesting research for a fiction film, the interviews I had were strong enough to become a documentary in their own right, and thus the idea of ‘Permanent End' was born. As it turned out, neither of these ‘death' projects became my ‘Independent' (I instead collaborated with Timo Tolonen on the reflexive film ‘Is this a Question? Is This an Answer?'), but now, two years after their initial conception, both ‘Permanent End' and ‘…' will be given ‘life' through Tiga Kali Studio . I hope you agree that the wait has been worth it.

Alex Barrett,
London, January 2006.

If you are a sales agent or distributor interested in acquiring the rights to ‘Permanent End', or a festival organiser interested in screening the film, then please contact us by emailing here.

Full cast and crew for ‘Permanent End':

Writer, Director and Editor: Alex Barrett
Producer: Alex Barrett and Maulin Patel
Executive Producer: Andrew Shau Seong Yap
Cinematographer: Alex Barrett.
Sound: Sledgehammer Sound

Featuring (in order of appearance):

Aaron Breslaw
Roland von Grafenstein
Christopher Hargreaves
Advait Hazarat
Sandy Taak
Jonathan Lim
William Darling
Sam Slattery
Christopher Robertson