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Jero Tapakan is ‘entered’ by deities and spirits who converse with her clients. Unbeknown to her, they wish to contact the spirit of their dead son to learn the cause...

Anne and Rosemary both chose to bury their husbands in the woods, whereas Tony was certain he didn’t want a vicar at his wife’s funeral. Focusing on the experiences of...

Hallelujah, a ‘bush mechanic’ turned archbishop, gets the funeral he deserves, one of the very biggest in Botswana’s railway town, Palapye. Many churches come together, their robes, splendid, their reverent...

Cemeteries are not only places for the dead. They are also spaces in which the living interact with each other – and with the dead. “Cultivating Death” depicts the different...

A last request of a Tiwi man on Melville Island was that a film be made of the pukumani (bereavment) ceremony to follow his death. The film follows his family,...

When Geraldine Kawanka’s husband died, she and her children left their house at Aurukun on Cape York Peninsula. In earlier times a bark house would have been burnt, but today...

*Pierre Miranda and a team from Granada Television have made a fine film exploring the trouble realities of the people of the lagoon in the 1980s.* (B. Shore) This film...

Antonio Lorenzano was an acclaimed musician, shamanic healer and craftsman, and the leader of the Warao community of Morichito on the Winikina River, in the lower Orinoco Delta, Venezuela. The...

The film is about the encounter between tradition and modernity. In a small village of Papua New Guinea three exceptional men rival with each other in the field of rituals...

A film about how anthropological knowledge is developed through active participation in traditional exchange ceremonies on the small island of Baluan in the South Pacific. The film follows the anthropologist...

In 1993, Anthony Forge filmed the cremation of an older woman from an affluent ‘commoner’ family. As her body was moved from her family compound to the cremation tower, men...

For the Ngarrindjeri people, the living and the dead are connected through shared land and heritage. The preservation of this connection is at the heart of the community’s effort to...

Anthropologist and filmmaker Carolina Arias Ortiz returns to Costa Rica to visit her estranged father. When he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, death suddenly draws close. During this time she...

In 1978, as part of the preparations for the island-wide ceremony eka dasa rudra, religious officials urged all Balinese to cleanse the island by cremating their dead. Many were forced...

Through following the daily life of a home for the elderly in Kathmandhu, Nepal, run by Catholic nuns but situated beside the cremation ghats of Pashupathinath Hindu temple, this film...

Nigerian writer Dul Johnson returns to Tarok land to observe the local death rituals and the record of the Tarok ways of dealing with grief and honoring departed. This film...

Although the events around which this film was planned were the final mortuary rites for Les Angabarraparra, the subject of the film became interaction. Interaction between the anthropologist Les Hiatt...

We Don’t Need a Grave’ attempts to show how the people who choose Shizenso rather than the typical family grave try to accept one’s death. Shizenso is a natural mortuary...