Three Maltese and a Scot have teamed up to create a short film that explores the sensitive subject of death by trying to change people’s perspectives and attitudes towards mortality, particularly those who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Writer and director Andrew Galea, 26, explains that Resonate, to be filmed in Scotland next month, follows Angie, a terminally ill cancer patient who is writing a letter to her husband in her final days.

In it Angie reminisces about how they met – she a coffee barista and he a composer – and fell in love. He brought music and harmony into her disjointed and fragmented life. How can the music continue now she is dying?

“There’s a dearth of adequate literature and practice aimed at helping people see out their final days,” Mr Galea explains.

“A lot of people find the old narratives like ‘spirituality’ that people use to console the dying deeply unsatisfying. Resonate was written with the explicit aim of presenting cancer sufferers, and indeed everyone, with an alternative attitude or perspective to death, and to start a conversation about new practices and therapies for people who are dying.”

Storyboard of the new short movie Resonate, about to be filmed, which tells the story of a coffee barista who writes a letter to her composer husband in her final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

The idea for Resonate came at a time when Mr Galea was feeling that his own world had become very small, that his options were limited and his future bleak.

One day he chanced upon a YouTube video in which the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson responded to the question: “What is the most astounding fact about the universe that you can share with us?”

We hope the story will resonate with the public

“In his response, Tyson elaborated on the fact that the human body is made of stardust, how we are the universe made conscious – a strikingly obvious yet oft over-looked fact about humanity.

“Although his language was initially quite scientific, Tyson eventually couched his answer in terms that perfectly captured the philosophical and personal importance of what this meant when he said: ‘When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity’.”

As with any independent venture, the greatest challenge is securing finance, which is why the team has set up a crowd-funding campaign in the hope that their story will “resonate” with the public enough to prompt contributions to the cause.

The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive, Mr Galea adds, with author and TED speaker Stephen Cave endorsing them, and charities and campaigns like Natural Death Centre and Death with Dignity supporting them.

“Despite being a short film, Resonate is a fairly large project involving a lot of talented people from both Malta and Scotland working within a tight timeframe of about a week’s principal photography.

“I’m very much looking forward to working with such a talented team that includes award-winning cinematographer Matthew Taylor, who I knew as a boy growing up in Malta, storyboard artist, animator and set-designer Christine Tong and Scottish composer Thomas Hansen who will be scoring original music for our film.

“Uniting the Maltese [Mr Taylor and Ms Tong] and Scottish members of the team will prove very satisfying.”

To help the team have the best equipment and structure in place to make Resonate as compelling as they imagine it can be, please visit: http://igg.me/p/807216/x/7567127 .