7. 21 May, Living (2022)

The terrible conversation in the hospital consulting room – that final rite of passage – is the starting point for this deeply felt, beautifully acted movie from screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus. A buttoned-up civil servant (played by Bill Nighy) works joylessly in the town planning department and receives a stomach-cancer diagnosis with one year to live. And now he realises that he has been dead until this moment. but there is one thing he might still achieve: forcing the city authorities to build the modest little children’s playground for which local mothers have been desperately petitioning and which he and his colleagues have been smugly preventing with their bureaucratic inertia.