Paul Cox, lauded as the father of independent cinema in Australia, has died a year after releasing a film loosely based on the months when death was knocking loudly at his door.
The author, photographer, and documentary and film maker died at the weekend, aged 76, leaving a celebrated body of cinematic works as his legacy.
Just last year Cox released Force of Destiny, starring David Wenham, which follows the journey of a man who finds love while waiting for a life-saving transplant.
The film was loosely based on Cox's own cancer battle before an eleventh-hour liver transplant in 2009 pulled him back from the brink.
The Australian Directors Guild didn't reveal the cause of the director's death in announcing his death on Twitter.
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But in an interview last year, Cox alluded to his health problems and offered a glimpse of what it's like to wait for a chance at life.
It was Christmas Day 2009 when he got the call that would buy him more time, just as he sat down for what he feared would be his last yuletide dinner.
"It saved my life for the time being," he told The Guardian Australia.
"But the cancer came back and went into my new liver. That really hurt me."
The filmmaker's Melbourne-based daughter, Kyra Cox, turned to Twitter to express her grief.
"Goodbye my beautiful daddy. I love you with all my heart and am so very proud to be your daughter," she wrote.
Wenham, whose character explored Cox's transplant experiences, has previously lauded the director of more than 20 feature films and 10 documentaries, more often than not focused on the themes of love and death.
"There is no one like Cox ... He is unique, and we need him, and people like him ... he is completely an auteur, because everything you see on the screen, and hear, has got Paul's fingerprints all over it."
Cox's films won him many accolades both at home and overseas.
Long before the advent of Tinder and online dating forums, his 1982 offering Lonely Hearts explored the life of a middle-aged man searching for love through a dating agency.
It won him the Australian Film Institute's award for best picture that year.
His 1984 film, My First Wife, inspired by the breakdown of his own marriage, also won him an AFI award for best director.
So many of his subsequent offerings were also lauded home and abroad, including his 2000 film Innocence, starring the late Bud Tingwell, and Julia Blake, as one-time lovers who meet again by chance again decades later and rekindle their romance.
Innocence won no fewer than 12 awards, mostly overseas, including the people's choice award for best film at the Montreal and Toronto film festivals.
