DOXA 2019 review: City of the Dead

(Spain)

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      “What happened to him?” asks a mortuary worker. “He feels empty,” replies the other, pulling the entire rib cage from a fresh corpse.

      That eye-opener aside, those of us tuned to the very tiny subgenre of docs about the death industry will find this contemplative piece closer to 1979’s haunting Des Morts than, say, the mondo autopsy porn of Death Scenes.

      Observing the daily business at Palma de Mallorca’s cemetery and funeral home—its crumbling spiral looks like it was designed by zombie Frank Lloyd Wright—Miguel Eek’s film wanders from an embalmer scoffing at Silicon Valley’s promise of human immortality “in the next 20 years”, to the solemn front-office business of selling coffins, where a widow insists to the funeral director that she saw an angel who alleviated her suffering.

      An aging security guard jokes that, yes, his colleagues will see him naked once he ends up on the slab, while two gardeners discuss the soul’s journey, a conversation that somehow becomes a bizarre dissertation on the prophetic meaning of Michael Bay’s Armageddon. But what else would you expect inside such a weird interzone of quotidian work, black humour, and sacred ground? 

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