Dance Me to The End of Time

This heartrending film documents the last four years of the life of director Melanie Chait’s partner, theatre director Nancy Duiguid, as she fought breast cancer. 20 years later, paying little attention to the taboo we place around death, Chait revisits the footage she shot at the time, in a poignant tribute to Nancy’s bravery and her battle to survive the disease, alongside her lifelong fight for social justice as an outspoken lesbian and artist. Woven into the personal story of Nancy, who grew up on a tobacco farm in Kentucky in the USA, where small planes regularly sprayed the fields with toxic pesticides, are insights from US scientist and ecologist Rachel Carson, whose seminal book, Silent Spring, exposed the health dangers of pesticides back in 1962. Archive footage from Carson’s television interviews in the 1960s provides possible explanations of the impact of the exposure to pesticides, not only on Nancy but also on the natural world.