When is a person not a person?

A short film about old age starring Agnes Bernelle as a bedridden woman seems an unusual entree into the world of drama for a Belfast production company whose previous screen credits include documentaries about drug cartels in Colombia and a professional boxer in Las Vegas.

But Double-Band Films have used the freedom involved in creating a story, rather than recording one, to tackle uncomfortable aspects of attitudes to old age - a subject which would be much more problematic for documentary makers.

Still Life, which premiered at the Cork Film Festival, is an elegiac and intimate 15-minute film which probes sensitive issues about age. The film is set in a room of a redbrick end-of-terrace in Belfast where Bernelle, a woman in her 70s, is spending the last years of her life in isolation. Over a 24-hour period, she reminisces about her failed marriage, her adult children now living in Canada and her dead friends.

She listens to the radio, watches television, studies old photographs.

Her thoughts are conveyed by interior monologue, her memories depicted largely by old home movie footage. As the routine of her day unfolds, we learn that her life has been bereft of physical or emotional intimacy; she had no lover before or after her husband (played by Belfast-based actor Conor Grimes) who left her when she was a young woman.

Writer and director, Michael Hewitt, says he wanted the film to explore not just the physical or emotional isolation of old people, but the "notion that there's a point at which a person ceases to be who they were. However rounded they still are, with emotions and physical desires, at some stage they stop being their full selves and become simply `old people'."

"While consciously we would deny it, when you think of what we consider as appropriate behaviour in old people, we are not comfortable with many things, particularly their sexual side."

Hewitt has, along with his colleague Diarmuid Lavery, been making documentaries for Channel 4, BBC 2, BBC Northern Ireland and RTE for 13 years. Double-Band Films is among a handful of experienced independent production companies in the North making documentaries.

Previous work includes Down the Street of Dreams, a feature-length documentary for BBC 2 in 1996 which traced the career of the Belfast boxer, Wayne McCullough, for three years, and Escobar's Own Goal, a film about the relationship between the Colombian drug cartels and football for Channel 4. The company is currently in postproduction with a documentary on the deeply sensitive issue of still birth for BBC Northern Ireland's autumn schedule.

Hewitt wrote the script for Still Life around 1984. He says it remained "on the back burner" because the company was unable to secure proper financial backing for it until this year. Funding bodies include An Chomhairle Ealaion and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, through the National Lottery Fund.

The film's budget was £64,000 sterling - about the same as that for an average half hour documentary for BBC Northern Ireland.

Hewitt cites the lack of funding sources for short films in the North, until recent years, as the main reason for the script's extremely long gestation period. He says that up until three or four years ago, "opportunities to make shorts here were practically non existent and it's only in recent years with the Lottery Fund and some of the schemes that the Northern Ireland Film Commission helped initiate with local broadcasters that it was possible for film makers to look realistically at producing projects like this one. There have probably been more shorts made in the North in the last three years than in the past 15 years."

While Lavery is described in the credits as the producer, Hewitt says the film was a collaborative effort, reflecting the close working relationship which they also have in their documentary work.

The film was shot over seven days. The lighting cameraman was John T. Davis - probably the best known documentary film maker in Ireland - whom the company has also worked with. "Because this film isn't plot-driven, but relies more on mood, we felt John was a cameraman who could capture that atmosphere," says Hewitt.

While Bernelle is the central character, her voice is that of Belfast actress, Barbara Adair. According to Hewitt, this did not pose any technical problems as most of her character's monologue is internal.

This also meant that Hewitt and Lavery did not have to limit their search for an actress to play the central character to the North. Hewitt says Bernelle instantly "tuned in" to the intimate nature of the script and was comfortable with the role.

He also says the move from documentary to drama was a smooth one. "The most different and most satisfactory thing for us was the level of control you have over individual shots because it's so precise. With documentary, we don't plan or script things in advance or have some sort of blueprint, it's very much just going out there and taking things as they happen. But with Still Life, there's not one sound that wasn't created by us or one frame that wasn't planned by us."

Still Life will be screened on Sunday, November 22nd, at the Queen's Film Theatre 1 at 8.30 p.m, as part of a programme of short films from Northern Ireland