EAST MEREDITH — Rural Pennsylvania filmmaker, Martin Krafft, grew up spending a lot of time in the woods as a child. When he moved to Montana for a job in 2020, he wanted to spend as much time outdoors as he could. That was how he met Rachel Heisham, a woman from Lawrenceville, PA, a small town along the New York border. They quickly became hiking buddies, but it turned out that Rachel was fighting a terminal cancer diagnosis. Martin asked if he could make a film about her fight to survive. Four years later, Martin’s documentary film, “Ain’t Got Time to Die,” will be having its New York premiere at the West Kortright Centre Film Festival, where it is nominated for “Best of Fest,” “Best Rural Film,” and “Best Documentary” awards.
The film follows the next two years of their friendship, in which Martin followed Rachel around the country, filming, from Montana, to Pennsylvania, to Kansas, back to Montana, then finally back to Pennsylvania. They had many adventures together, getting stuck overnight in a hot springs in the freezing cold and meeting a range of characters in the wilds of Montana, "Jesus Joe" and "Spiderman," to name a couple. As Rachel's health deteriorated, Martin became increasingly involved in her life, driving her to doctor's appointments and fundraising money for her living expenses. He met Rachel's three adult children and encouraged her to try to reconcile with her daughter. He traveled to Lawrenceville, PA, and Rachel pointed out the places important in her youth: where she had smoked her first cigarette, where her cousin had driven off the road and died, and where her first horse was buried.
The weight of Rachel's sickness often prevented Martin from filming. He struggled with deciding how much responsibility to take for Rachel's well-being, and how much to push her to accept the changes happening in her body. "I was so caught up in Rachel's life, how she was going to pay the bills, whether she would get better or not, whether she would accept what was happening to her, that I barely had time to think about the film," Martin said.
Starting the film with no budget, Krafft had to fundraise from friends and family. The fundraising allowed him to hire an award-winning editor, Emma Thatcher, who was very excited to work on telling Rachel's story. Grant Bloom composed the score.
The film will be having its New York premiere on August 25th at the West Kortright Centre Film Festival at 11 am. The trailer for the film can be seen at: https://www.martinkrafft.com/aint-got-time-to-die.
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