Guth Gafa Documentary Festival 2008

Nothing to be Scared of
Poland, 2006, 39 min
Director: Małgorzata Szumowska

Sat 17th • Óstán Loch Altan • 11:00am
(with The Clinic)
Sun 18th • Óstán Loch Altan • 5:45pm

What do you wear on your last journey, especially when you have put on weight and your garments don't fit anymore? Is it permissible to comb the hair of the dead? Should you speak to them? Why are corpses these days always so very good looking? What kind of wood should you choose for the coffin, something calming such as citrus, or something that will last forever? Polish Masurian farmers, sitting on benches in front of their houses, talk about death, and more precisely, about how death has to be - how to help the dying person from one world to the other, how the deceased lies in the house until everybody has said goodbye, how the spirit remains in the house, how everybody comes to the funeral (after all you would want some sort of atmosphere at your own!), and what things mean: the sound of a cockerel, the position of the eyes, determining whether a man or a woman will die next.
Without ever being picturesque, ethnographic or esoteric, the film succeeds with wonderful lightness, to trespass the border between life and death, despite the rigidity of urban civilisation. It leads to a folk religion, considering both life and death as one entity, embedded in the image of a metaphysical wholeness of man and nature, subtly hinted at in pictures of landscapes. Death is not really a reason to be afraid, you only have to pay attention to which eye you close first.