Photo by Ross Ferguson

“Love Actually”, “About Time” Billy Nighy appear to be the distinguish English gentleman in the first image released from upcoming film “Living,” in which the actor plays a 1950s civil servant struggling with a life-threatening diagnosis. The bowler hat and sharp pinstripe suit was prepared by an Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, who has attached this project.

Lionsgate has taken UK distribution rights on Living, it’s an English-language adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Ikiru. Nobel and Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro has written the screenplay. Moffie filmmaker Oliver Hermanus is helming. Producers are Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen at Number 9 Films.

 

Set in London 1952, Living focuses on Williams (Nighy) a veteran civil servant, who has become a cog in the bureaucracy of rebuilding post WWII England. As paperwork piles up on his desk, Williams learns he has seven months to live. Thus begins his quest to find meaning in his life before it slips away.

Original Japanese film, “Ikiru” was made 1952, the film depicts the existential struggle of one ordinary man in his desperate search for purpose. Upon learning he has terminal stomach cancer, a low-level government bureaucrat (Takashi Shimura) leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the year he has left to live.