Movies: Dying and death

Thomas Haemmerli is about to celebrate his fortieth birthday when he learns of his mother's death. A further shock follows when he and his brother Erik discover her apartment, which is filthy and full to bursting with junk. It takes the brothers an e...

Rhena's father tells a story about Atlas, a forest entity that whispers stories of the dead to its trees. That same night he disappears into this forest. Rhena does everything she can to get her father back....

A lonely woman's prank phone call leads to an unexpected friendship with a grieving widow....

A group of young UN soldiers in Lebanon enters service with pro-Israeli views and a naive outlook on war. They go through a radical change of heart as they witness and film the Qana massacre. They secure video evidence indicating that Israel delibera...

Two soldiers, Daniel and Jerome, flee a war we don’t see and we know nothing about. Jerome is badly injured, he will die, he says it, he knows it, he is afraid. Then Jerome confesses to Daniel his last will: he does not want to die a virgin, he wants...

"What could be more unsettling than a man close to death whose profound arrogance drives him relentlessly to hang onto both his power and his writing, to the bitter end?" In the twilight of his second seven-year term, François Mitterrand was alone. ...

In Uganda, AIDS-infected mothers have begun writing what they call Memory Books for their children. Aware of the illness, it is a way for the family to come to terms with the inevitable death that it faces. Hopelessness and desperation are confronted...

n the Jam Jar is an invitation to the intimacy of 81-year-old Joan’s final days, whose musings silently echo with Dan’s, her 50-year-old son. This fiction short-movie is a dive into death and grief, a tribute to maternal love comprised of nail clippi...

A documentary that explores how seven remarkable people embrace their pain, learn to live with their loss, and now engage in life with more compassion, courage, and awareness. The personal and moving stories include those of author Isabel Allende, Re...

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Maria recounted the chronology of her father's death many times to the visiting guests....

Most of us think of death as something clear-cut, and that medical science has it neatly figured out. This feature documentary explodes such assumptions through its exploration of a phenomenon that blurs life and death to an unprecedented degree. In...

Switzerland is the only country in the world that allows foreigners to come and die on its territory. Since its founding in 1998, more than a thousand people have traveled to Zurich to end their lives with the help of the organization Dignitas. "Dign...

After an unsuccessful goose hunt, a young girl grapples with seeing her father in a new light....

In 1974, a soldier, having now returned home, is haunted by shadows from the past, but are they just in his mind?...

Are paranormal experiences real? Can being 'spiritual' help with the way you feel about death, dying and grief? This British film, from the university that pioneered distance learning through BBC Television, explores themes of spiritual healing and ...

In fremder Erde (In Foreign Soil) documents the Muslim traditions of burial in Turkey and Germany, but above all, the paths the dead take to return to Anatolian soil....

In 2017 Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, formerly The KLF, returned after 23 years of silence with a new project. They were no longer a pop group but undertakers, building the People's Pyramid out of bricks made from the ashes of dead people....

Bill Moyers and filmmaker David Grubin give viewers a rare glimpse into dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones’s highly acclaimed dance Still/Here. At workshops around the country, people facing life-threatening illnesses are asked to remember the highs ...

Opera written by inmates of a Nazi concentration camp in 1943 before their murder in Auschwitz....