Babenco: Tell Me When I Die

“I’ve already lived my death, now all I have to do is make a movie about it,” said the filmmaker Hector Babenco to Bárbara Paz, realizing that he didn’t have much time left. She accepted the mission and fulfilled her partner’s last wish: to be the protagonist of his own death. In this loving immersion into the filmmaker’s life, he bares himself fully before the camera, revealing his fears, anxieties, memories, and reflections in a confrontation between the intellectual vigor and physical frailty that marked his life. From his first experience of cancer at age thirty-eight to his death at seventy, Babenco made movies the medicine that helped him continue living. TELL ME WHEN I DIE is Barbara Paz’s first film but also, in a way, Babenco’s last work—a film about filming, never to die.