Nurses come and go, but none for me

Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski / United Kingdom / 2025 / International Premiere / 122 min

When Ed Atkins’ father was in hospital for the last six months of his life, he kept a meticulous diary. An intimate document about physical decline, social life in the hospital, medical bureaucracy, and love. Together with Steven Zoltanski, Atkins has staged his father’s diaries in a performative film in two acts: one long and one short. It all takes place in a simple but enigmatic scene in a living room.

Here, the eminent actor Toby Jones reads the diaries aloud from beginning to end with carefully measured diction and distance. His audience is his wife (played by Saskia Reeves) and a small group of young listeners. The second act builds on a game that Atkins plays with his daughter, in which she pretends to be sick and demands the most incredible, magical treatments. Both the diary and the game were originally private creations, even though their existence presupposes the imagination of an audience. The film makes this fantasy literal by staging them in front of an audience and by focusing as much on the faces of the audience as on the performers themselves. The work was created for Atkins’ recent exhibition at Tate Modern.