Don’t Let Me Die is a hauntingly atmospheric story about confronting loss, the absurdity of dying and the strange connections we forge – or fail to forge – in a world that feels both familiar and deeply unsettling. Set in a gloomy winter seaside town and the grey monotony of an apartment block, the film follows Maria, a quiet woman whose life is upended when her neighbour, Isabela, is found dead at the building’s entrance. With no legal ties to the deceased, Maria reluctantly takes on the burden of arranging the burial, a task that soon turns into a labyrinth of bureaucratic absurdity. As she adopts Isabela’s mixed-breed dogs, meets her estranged son and crosses paths with a plethora of peculiar characters, Maria drifts into a liminal world where real and unreal, presence and absence, life and death bleed into each other. Blending dry humour with unsettling, eerie undertones, Don’t Let Me Die is both a poetic meditation on collective apathy, emotional isolation, loneliness and grief, and an enigmatic exploration of what remains when someone vanishes without truly being known.

Awards: Locarno FF 2025 (Concorso Cineasti del Presente)