'Still Life' is a love letter to the women I grew up with. Women like my mother and her friends, perhaps the last generation who were brought up with the idea of the suburban Australian dream of a house and kids as the pinnacle of life’s achievements. Women who filled our home with friendship and laughter, who would grill prospective boyfriends and spill blood for us. We were fussed over and spoilt, yes, but also taught kindness, patience and grit. As I grew older, they got a front seat to the changes unfolding in my life and I a view into theirs. Couples I never imagined would ever separate (and only ever really knew as a couple, as if both parties only ever existed as a part of the other) separated and I began to see something that I hadn’t seen before – bitterness, anger, regret, a loss of identity. I don’t want to generalise an entire generation of women – this is specifically inspired by individuals in my life and their experiences – but it didn’t seem that the men had as much to lose. Biological changes notwithstanding, it was always the women who had the most to lose in separation – the loss of identity, the loss of idealism, the loss of material possessions being more deeply felt. Eloise was born from another script, a much longer project with a much larger cast, and coming out of covid and moving back to Sydney after six years in Melbourne, I wanted to make something smaller and more intimate. She was always a character I loved and I wanted the challenge of going deeper. She is not the type of character that we see a lot in films or television. The changes she is going through – menopause and separation – are underexplored and universal. The title, 'Still Life', was inspired by still life paintings – moments of fleeting perfection captured in perpetuity. It’s an apt metaphor for Eloise’s life with Terry – trapped in a fantasy that she thought she had to live and not sure what life could be without it. You can’t distil a lifetime into an image. It can be hard to let go of the person we used to be and the person we thought we should be but are not. But life – still – goes on and we have to keep on living.