With LAST DAYS, award-winning filmmaker Gus Van Sant takes his recent experiments with cinematic language to new levels of refinement, creating a film that is both poetic and life-like. The film pares away extraneous narrative to simply observe the bare experience of a troubled young musician approaching the end of his life. Through its handling of cinematic elements – images, sounds and actions – LAST DAYS draws us into an environment that is as much emotional and sensory as it is material. A film designed for individual interpretation, LAST DAYS is an intimate meditation on isolation, death and loss. It is a requiem and a remembrance.

LAST DAYS continues the aesthetic approach of Van Sant’s previous two films – the Palme d’Or-winning ELEPHANT (2003) and GERRY (2002). All three films have used elliptical storytelling, fixed settings and improvisational acting techniques to deliver multi-layered yet emotionally accessible presentations of human beings and their behavior. In each film, we spend time with the characters in their given environment and Van Sant’s attention to detail allows us to feel the characters’ sensations almost as our own.

Like its predecessors, LAST DAYS grew out of events covered in the media. “There’s a trilogy - films that are inspired by stories that were in the papers,” Van Sant observes. “GERRY was inspired by a news item about two guys that got lost in the desert. ELEPHANT was a way to look at the wave of school shootings, like Columbine, that happened in America in the late 90s. And LAST DAYS came out of the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.”