Live!

2018, 90 minutes

Reality can lie. Imagination can tell you the truth.

When Dutch Middle-East correspondent Michiel van Dijk gets killed by American fire, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, his Italian colleague Claudia Portinari cannot get over his death. Being dead Michiel ends up in an imagined afterlife that looks like a regular hotel. The TV in the lobby shows Claudia, reporting on how life continues without him and he wonders if his short life has made any sense. Guided by a philosopher a poet and a monk, Michiel gets the keys to different rooms of the hotel where he can investigate the facts and fictions of his life, to understand if there was any meaning to it. Meanwhile Claudia's relentless investigation into the cause of his death tells us that her feelings for Michiel have been more than just work related. He has always loved her, but she has never fully answered his feelings and still denies them, claiming to investigate his death merely to proof it has been a deliberate attack on independent journalism. Only when Claudia has to look death in the eye herself, as a reporter during the current war in Syria, she finally questions the fear she’s always felt to tell Michiel that she loved him. A public confession about this in a TV interview brings Michiel his longed for answer when he is watching the broadcast in the lobby of hotel afterlife. When Claudia dies shortly after, they are reunited at last.

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