21/05/2003 - The boundary between life and death has ceased to exist in the British short filmmaker's feature debut, but the film is given the coldest of receptions

It would be hard to get off to a worse start in one's career as a feature film director than that experienced today by English short filmmaker Emily Young whose Kiss of Life got the "Kiss of Death" after screening in Un Certain Regard in Cannes.
This imperfect film is about a man’s long and difficult journey from the former Yugoslavia to London. He does not know that his wife is dead. The audience and the dead woman re-live some of the couple’s happiest times together in a series of flashbacks.
“I wanted to explore the moment that follows the instant of death and the life of a family reeling in the face of such a tragedy,” said Young. “The dead meet the living in a sort of limbo where the passage of time no longer has any meaning.”
The Anglo-French co-production was boarded by Take 5, Wild Horses and Haut et Court and made with a Euros2.4m budget, Euros115,000 of which from the sale of the TV rights. Kiss of Life also received support from the UK’s Film Council, BBC Films, France 3 Cinéma, Gimages Films and Sofica Images.

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(Translated from Italian)