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Movies

Still from the film

Departures

A newly unemployed cellist takes a job preparing the dead for funerals.

Mourning Recipe (四十九日のレシピ)

Ryohei’s wife suddenly passes away, leaving him without the will to live. As the family begins cooking dishes from the recipe book she left them, they are able to mourn her death and begin to heal.

Miss Evers Boys

The true story of the U.S. Government’s 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which a group of black test subjects were allowed to die, despite a cure having been developed.

Harold and Maude

Young, rich, and obsessed with death, Harold finds himself changed forever when he meets lively septuagenarian Maude at a funeral.

The Ballad of Narayama

In a poor 19th century rural Japanese village, everyone who reaches the age of 70 has to climb a nearby mountain to die. An old woman is getting close to the cut-off age, and we follow her last days with her family.

Resting Place

The mysterious death of an army officer comes under investigation by Major Kendall Laird as the young soldier’s parents seek an honorable burial place, out of respect for their son.

Amour

Georges and Anne are an octogenarian couple. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple’s bond of love is severely tested.

The Farewell

Angels in America

Adapted from Tony Kushner’s award-winning plays about social, sexual, religious and other issues facing 1980s America as the AIDS crisis gains momentum.

The Loved One

A 1965 comedy about the funeral business in Los Angeles. The film was based on the short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh which was inspired by his visit to Forest Lawn.

Dayveon

Struggling with his older brother’s death, 13-year-old Dayveon spends the sweltering summer days roaming the streets of his rural Arkansas town.

To Dust

Unable to live with his grief following the death of his wife from cancer, a Hasidic cantor, Shmuel fixates on what’s happening to her corpse. To help him find out he befriends a biology professor.

The Farewell

Billi’s family returns to China under the guise of a fake wedding to stealthily say goodbye to their beloved matriarch—the only person that doesn’t know she only has a few weeks to live.

Summer 1993

After her mother’s death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle’s family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.

Ikiru

Mr. Watanabe suddenly finds that he has terminal cancer. He vows to make his final days meaningful.


Documentaries

A Will for the Woods

Award-winning environmental documentary about the green burial movement.

R.I.P T-Shirts 

Each day, families and friends of recently deceased young Black people visit Jonathan Robinson’s shop, commissioning wearable tributes to their loved ones.

306 Hollywood

When siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarín undertake an archaeological excavation of their late grandmother’s house, they embark on a magical-realist journey in search of what life remains in the objects we leave behind.

City Of a Million Dreams

A look at New Orleans through the lens of the city’s jazz funeral traditions.

Extremis

Witness the emotions that accompany end-of-life decisions as doctors, patients and families in a hospital ICU face harrowing choices.

Homegoings

Homegoings takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration.

Still from the documentary

My Love, Don’t Cross That River

A South Korean doc that follows that follows an elderly married couple until the last moments of their 76-year marriage.

The Cancer Journals Revisited

This film was prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today.

The Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is one of the world’s most popular suicide spots. Filmed over the course of a year, this documentary captures a number of suicides and features interviews with the friends and family of some of the people identified to have jumped from the bridge.

Dreams of a Life

A filmmaker sets out to discover the life of Joyce Vincent, who died at home in North London in 2003. Her body wasn’t discovered for three years, and newspaper reports offered few details of her life—not even a photograph.

Black Heirlooms

Black Heirlooms is a documentary about creating and preserving family wealth in communities of color.

Still Loved

Still Loved explores the complexity and reality for families surviving baby loss.

A Certain Kind of Death

This documentary lays bare a mysterious process that goes on all around us—what happens to people who die with no next of kin.

Meeting You

Meeting You shows the emotional reunion of a mother and her deceased 6-year-old daughter from an unidentified illness via advanced virtual reality.

The Undertaking

Go behind the scenes with a fourth generation undertaker in a Michigan funeral home.

A Story of Bones

Activists’ efforts to reclaim a burial site containing thousands of formerly enslaved Africans.

306 Hollywood

Serving Life

Serving Life documents an extraordinary hospice program where hardened criminals inside Angola Prison, care for their dying fellow inmates.

Children of the Pyre

This documentary follows the life of seven children who are working under extreme conditions at India’s busiest cremation ground, Manikarnika in Banaras.

How to Die in Oregon

In 1994 Oregon became the first state to legalize a terminally ill person’s request to end his or her life with medication. How to Die in Oregon tells the stories of those most intimately involved with the practice today—terminally ill Oregonians, their families, doctors, and friends.

Death By Delivery

Nelufar Hedayat investigates a crisis in maternal care, exploring why African American women are up to four times more likely to die of pregnancy related causes than their white counterparts.

How To Survive A Plague

In the late 1980s, members of Act-Up and other AIDS activists battle hostility and indifference to bring attention to the disease and try to reduce the number of victims while hoping to lead the drive to find a cure.

América

América is a story of brothers confronting the chasm between adolescent yearning and adult realities when brought together to care for their ailing ninety-three year old grandmother.

End Game

Terminally ill patients in a San Francisco hospital meeting medical practitioners seeking to change the perception around life and death.

Undeterred

How a community in Arizona mobilized to defend their rights and to provide aid to injured, oft times dying people funneled across a wilderness desert.

Two Gods

A Muslim ritual body washer and casket maker in New Jersey takes two young under his wing to teach them how to live a better life.

The Passing On

A film about renowned embalmer James Bryant and the disappearing tradition of Black funeral homes.


Other

Return To Zero

Dirge Singer

A young girl is forced to become a dirge singer or professional mourner, hired to accompany funeral wagons and cry ritually as they are taken to burial.

Time: The Kalief Browder Story

The criminal justice system tragically failed 16-year-old Kalief Browder, who spent three years in Rikers Island jail awaiting trial—two of those years in solitary confinement. His case was never prosecuted, the charges were ultimately dropped, and Browder committed suicide after his release. His story and the challenges it poses to a basic understanding of American liberties are central to this six-part documentary. Time: The Kalief Browder Story is currently available to stream on Netflix 2021.

Return to Zero

Based on the true story of a couple who are preparing for the arrival of their first child. Just weeks before their due date they are devastated to discover that their baby son has died in the womb and will be stillborn.

Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland

This HBO series explores the death of Sandra Bland, a politically active 28-year-old Black woman who, after being arrested for a traffic violation in a small Texas town, was found dead in her jail cell three days later.

Yonder

What if you could design your death? This is the central question of Yonder, which explores the ethics of trying to control death, how we do (or don’t) deal with grief, and what happens when we use technology to manipulate our lives, deaths, and the afterlife.

Still from docuseries