Why I made 'a feel-good movie about death'

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2023 edition by Georges Hannan focuses on his film Undertaker for Life!, which finds "an unexpected joie de vivre" in our end-of-life rituals.

I always like visiting my 94-year-old mother and listening to her stories. I don't have much choice in the matter as her hearing doesn't permit us to have a conversation, so I do a lot of nodding and facial expressions. One story I've heard a few times is about the day she discovered her father "stuffed" the dead. 

In a small village on an island in northern New Brunswick that my future mother called home, funeral homes were nowhere to be seen. People would knock on the door and have hushed adult conversations, and my grandfather would say, "I'll wash up and meet you there." He would sharpen his knife and head out. My young mother was old enough to understand that someone was gone, but she couldn't understand what her father could possibly do about it.

Moments like that are often the inspiration for a film, but at the time I was too busy miming fascination to get more details from my mother — not about the gory aspects, but rather the social implications of having a grandfather who tended to the dead and a grandmother who helped local women give birth. Life and death both needed help to exist in the community.

Though my craft at the time was location sound recording, a filmmaking seed was planted. And I would eventually harvest that seed with my documentary Undertaker for Life!

At funerals, I've always admired the undertakers' control of their emotions (and I always remind myself to never play poker with them). I've looked at them as "cleaners" who were called upon once the health system had run out of ideas on how to keep a body alive. But during the research phase for my film, I had to bury that view as I discovered their warmth and compassion. And did I mention their dark, deadpan sense of humour? While watching someone jog, an undertaker once casually said to me, "That guy's going to die healthy." 

When looking for my film subjects, I try to find like-minded people who have the same background and are misunderstood by society. Attempting to prearrange a meeting with a funeral director was rarely effective, so instead I would just walk into a funeral parlour (after making sure the parking lot was empty), and they would greet me as a customer. It worked most days. 

Breaking through their emotional barrier was my first challenge. The next step was to "turn the tables" on them and listen — which is what we usually pay them for. Before religion lost its place in society, their job was much easier. Everything was decided by convention; funerals weren't put off for the convenience of everyone, as if grieving was something you could place on a shelf to be dealt with at a later date. The direction of my film slowly started to take shape as the things the undertakers wanted to tell the universe, not my interpretation of their reality, became the story.

Around the same time, a good friend and neighbour got in a jam with a thing called cancer. He moved downstairs when the steps to his bedroom seemed to get steeper. We would spend hours in his "living" room talking about the good old days, and he would sometimes ask what I had done all morning. I would talk about a chore or something, trying to avoid telling him that I'd spent the morning discussing death at a local funeral home. 

As time went by, I helped with meals, appointments and, finally, with diapers. I felt I was helping someone on a lifelong hike to the grave.

On the day my friend decided to leave on his own, I cooked his favourite last meal, lapin à la moutarde avec morilles. This closeness to death redefined my life. To live fully, you have to be conscious of death — the two are intertwined.

"I don't have a problem with corpses — it's the living that are hard to manage." That's what one undertaker said to me, and it nicely sums up how they see our relationship with death. Death isn't funny, but our way of avoiding the inevitable sure is. My doc doesn't make fun of death, but rather, our relationship with the afterlife. Watching it, it's sort of like watching a feel-good movie about death.

Undertaker for Life! screens at Hot Docs 2023 on Monday, May 1.

This essay is part of CBC Arts's coverage of the 2023 Hot Docs Festival.