A quiet story of life inside cancer ward

In 2018, at a dinner with actor Wang Baoqiang, filmmaker Chen Sicheng encountered an insider from the medical device industry, who shared stories rarely heard outside hospital walls — of strangers forming a fragile community inside a cancer ward, of abandoned children navigating life on the margins.

The stories stayed with him. Soon after, Chen sent a writing team into hospitals to speak with doctors and patients, gathering fragments of lives shaped by illness and uncertainty. Years later, those fragments have taken shape as Being Towards Death, a film set for nationwide release on May 1 after a round of advance screenings in 12 cities, including Beijing and Changsha in Hunan province during the weekend.

The film follows actor Jiang Long as Zhang Xiaobing, a man pulled back from a suicide attempt and forced by debt and circumstances into work as a caregiver in a cancer ward. Tasked with offering emotional support to patients nearing the end of life, he becomes part of a fragile, improvised community. What unfolds is less a conventional drama than a portrait of uneasy companionship: the living and the dying sharing space, humor, and, at times, defiance.