In her first feature, the London-based Spanish filmmaker Maria Martínez Bayona has assembled an impressive collection of international, well-known actors. 

Rebecca Hall, Gael Garcia Bernal, Noomi Rapace, and Beanie Feldstein all star in The End Of It, which follows Claire, a performance artist who, thanks to advancements in medicine, has reached the age of 250. But she is now ready to die. 

The official synopsis reads: In a near-future world where ageing can be cured and death is now optional, Claire (Hall), a former provocative artist approaching her 250th birthday, decides she’s had enough – she wants to die. Her decision stirs conflicts with her husband (Bernal), daughter (Noomi Rapace), and AI assistant (Beanie Feldstein), revealing the humorous complexity of their relationships. As Claire uses her impending death to reclaim her role as an artist, she is forced to face what it really means to die, to live, and the messy absurdity of it all. 

“Years ago, I read an article. I’ve almost memorized it now. It said something like ‘The first person who will live to 150-years-old has already been born.’ This completely blew my mind,” Bayona said of the film’s plot. “I guess I was going through some existential crisis at that point. I started to think about what would happen if we could reach a point where we could just live very long lives. And what kind of relationships and societies we would have.” 

On landing her impressive ensemble, Bayona said she was the beneficiary of a certain level of luck.

“It was a process of luck, being in the right place, and having a script that people liked when they read it,” she said. “We developed the film, and then it fell to Ellen Chenoweth and Susanne Scheel, who are amazing casting directors. That took it to the next dimension.”

The End Of It was produced by Emilie Jouffroy and Kamilla Kristiane Hodøl for Elation Pictures (The Damned), and Adrià Monés Murlans for Fasten Films (Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell). Dyveke Bjørkly Graver and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar co-produce for Eye Eye Pictures (Sentimental Values). The film was developed with the support of BBC Film and iFeatures.

Executive producers include JC Acosta and Erika Kennair for The Mediapro Studio, Claudia Yusef and Alice Ojha for BBC Film, and Ford Corbet, Nathan Klingher, and Apur Parikh for Barreling Wave Pictures.

Bankside Films is handling international sales excluding Latin America, which is managed directly by The Mediapro Studio, while WME Independent is representing North America.

Check out our full interview with Maria Martínez Bayona above. 

The Deadline Studio at Cannes is sponsored by SCAD.