Following its BAFTA qualification, writer-producer Kate Radcliffe and director Sophie King sit down to discuss Still Life, their deeply personal short film starring Ophelia Lovibond and Jacob Anderson.

Drawing from Radcliffe’s own experience of losing her son, Dexter, the creative duo explore how they balanced profound grief with unexpected humour to portray the reality of navigating life after stillbirth.

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What did you most want to say about life after stillbirth that you rarely see represented on screen?

KATE: We deliberately didn’t want to focus too much on the actual moment of stillbirth, because for me, so much of the reality of baby loss is what happens afterwards. Your world has shattered into a thousand pieces, but somehow you’re expected to carry on living in it.

There can be a perception that after the funeral, or perhaps after you go on to have another child, you’ve picked yourself up and you’re somehow OK again. But those can actually be some of the hardest times.

That’s what we wanted to explore in Still Life: the everyday triggers that nobody prepares you for. It can be something enormous, or something completely mundane — a Mother’s Day card, a baby aisle in a supermarket, somebody innocently asking the wrong question. You experience this one huge, traumatic event, but then there are a thousand smaller moments and milestones that you have to navigate for years afterwards. I don’t think we see enough of that on screen — not just the loss itself, but what it actually means to live after it.

SOPHIE: Films about baby loss – which are rare in themselves – are often so horrific that I suspect many viewers shy away from watching them in the first place. It was important to us that Still Life not be a traumatising watch. As Kate says, it was about crafting a puzzle of the smaller moments, both good and bad, which make up the day to day reality of trying to go back to “normal” following such a seismic personal event.

How did you approach portraying grief as something that continues, rather than something that can simply be overcome?

KATE: We wanted to be honest about the fact that grief doesn’t have an end point, it can resurface when you least expect it. You don’t simply overcome something like this and move on. I don’t think you’d want to, because ‘getting over it’ can almost imply you’re forgetting, and you never want to forget your baby. There’s an analogy about grief that has always resonated with me: the grief itself doesn’t necessarily get smaller, but your life slowly grows around it. You learn how to carry it and live alongside it.

That’s why it was important that we leave Jess and Max together on the supermarket floor. It isn’t a moment of closure, and their journey hasn’t suddenly ended. They’re simply finding a way through that particular moment together. Life will continue, and so will their grief.

SOPHIE: Exactly, it was so necessary for us that the film ended with a message of hope, and there are a couple of Easter eggs that do that, such as finishing on the rainbow card which within the Trying To Conceive community is a symbol for a subsequent baby born after loss, and in featuring Kate’s own rainbow son as our little boy in the supermarket.

We didn’t want to pretend that suddenly everything is fine, as it doesn’t happen like that, but these little nods are suggestions that Jess will eventually experience brighter days.

How did you balance the personal origins of the story with the need to create space for Jess and Max as fictional characters?

KATE: At first, it was quite difficult to separate Jess and Max from my husband and me because the story came from such a personal place. There was obviously a lot of me in Jess, and a lot of our own experience in their relationship. But at some point I realised that this wasn’t just our story.

Sadly, it’s the story of thousands and thousands of parents who have lost babies, all of whom will have experienced it differently. I also think that separation was important creatively. When you’re making a film, you have to find the truth in something, but you also have to tell a story that works dramatically and is engaging to watch.

Giving ourselves permission to fictionalise things meant we could use humour, heighten certain situations and create characters that hopefully allow lots of different people to recognise something of their own experience in them.

SOPHIE: A lot of this came from casting too – in our hero cast such as Ophelia Lovibond, Jacob Anderson and Felicity Montagu, we were blessed with actors who are supremely talented dramatic actors who give every moment a sincere truth, but who also all have tremendous comic timing too. This wicked combination led to such wonderfully nuanced reactions and facial expressions that I feel give a levity – and absolute shout out has to go to Phoebe Pryce, supremely supported by Alex, in the supermarket for her cringe-inducing yet ultimately harmless portrayal of a friend who puts her foot in it.

Benjamin Salmon brought a brilliant humour to the start of the film as the yoga instructor too; I hope that this lets the audience know from the start that they can relax as there will be lightness in this film as well as plenty of shade – just like real life.

The film finds moments of humour alongside profound grief. Why was that balance important to you?

KATE: The humour was never there to diminish the grief. If anything, it was there to make it feel more human. Grief and laughter can exist side by side, and I found that after losing Dexter, some of the most devastating moments could also be strangely absurd.

Sometimes you laugh because the alternative is to cry. When people go through trauma, life doesn’t suddenly become uniformly dark and serious. There are still ridiculous situations, awkward conversations and moments when you find yourself laughing, sometimes when you least expect to. It was also important in terms of how we wanted an audience to experience the film. If you make something relentlessly harrowing, particularly about a subject as difficult as stillbirth, there’s a danger that people protect themselves by switching off.

We hoped that bringing humour and warmth into the film would allow people to stay with Jess and Max, relate to them and perhaps leave thinking about baby loss in a way they might not have before. Getting that balance right was probably one of the hardest things, because we never wanted the audience to feel they were laughing at the grief. The humour comes from the absurdity of the world carrying on around you while you’re trying to comprehend something completely life-changing.

For me, that contrast is actually very truthful to what grief can feel like.

What do you think people often misunderstand about the experience of losing a baby?

KATE: I think the first thing to say is that most people are just trying to be supportive. It’s an incredibly heartbreaking and difficult situation, and everyone around you is muddling through it as best they can. But there are misconceptions that can be very painful. One is the idea that if you go on to have another child, somehow that heals the grief, or that because you got pregnant once, you can simply get pregnant again. Those are things you really don’t want to hear when you’ve lost a baby. Another child can never replace the child you lost.

I also think there has historically been this idea that bereaved parents don’t want to talk about their baby because it will be too painful. For me, the opposite is true. I’m at a stage now where all I want to do is talk about Dexter — you can’t shut me up! And I think a lot of bereaved parents want the same opportunity every other parent has: to talk about their child. To tell you their name, what they looked like, the time they got to spend with them, even how they smelt.

When a baby dies, so many of the future memories you expected to make with them are suddenly taken away. The memories you do have become incredibly precious. Sometimes asking someone if they want to talk about their child is one of the kindest things you can do.

SOPHIE: Kate was so admirably honest with everyone, from the cast to the crew, about her experiences of losing Dexter, and the film is a thousand times stronger as a result. There are so many special details, such as the little fabric knitted square that Jess holds against her when she is with her baby following his stillbirth.

This was the actual square that Kate had with her in the hospital with Dexter, an item given to parents in the NICU so their babies can smell them, and I know it meant a tremendous amount to Ophelia and Jacob to have real items such as this to elevate the emotional truth beyond anything words could ever do justice.

How did you and Sophie work together to create something that felt emotionally honest without becoming overly sentimental?

KATE: One of the things we didn’t know when we first approached Sophie was how personally connected she was to the subject. She has experienced miscarriage and a long journey with IVF, and her brother was stillborn, so baby loss had been a conversation within her family for a very long time.

When we discovered that — on top of already being huge fans of her work — we knew she was the perfect person to direct the film. We trusted that she would treat the story with the care and respect it deserved. What was also really important was that Sophie and I have a very similar sense of humour. As much as we both understood the heartbreak of baby loss, we could also share countless experiences that were absurd and unexpectedly funny. I

’d seen portrayals of stillbirth that were incredibly powerful but also very harrowing. What I hadn’t really seen was something that captured all the strange nuance around what comes afterwards — the sadness, the awkwardness, the mundane and the funny all existing together. Sophie understood from the beginning that this was the balance we were trying to find. Because she had that personal understanding, I never felt we needed to push the emotion or tell the audience how to feel.

We could trust the story, the performances and the quieter moments. I think that restraint is ultimately what stopped it from becoming overly sentimental.