Death becomes them
A Certain Kind of Death investigates the ultimate kind of alienation
Two years ago, Blue Hadaegh was living in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles when her 80-year-old next door neighbor was found dead in his front yard.
Much to her distress, when the coroner's investigator approached her to identify the body, she was unable to do so.
Like hundreds of others each year in Los Angeles, the elderly man died without family or friends and among neighbors who never even knew his name.
The incident was a troubling reminder of the difference between Hadaegh's upbringing in Iran — where family is a constant presence from birth to death — and the often solitary experience of urban America.
"I felt like, how could that ever be possible that you die alone?" asks Hadaegh.
Hadaegh was exacerbated by the guilt that for five years she had lived next door to the man and had never once spoken to him. An ugly lesson in modern estrangement led to a powerful documentary about how our society treats its dead.
A Certain Kind of Death lifts the veil on one of the essential mysteries of life: What happens to us after we die — especially for people like Hadaegh's neighbor who have no one to bury them?
The film was produced by Hadaegh and Roswell-native Grover Babcock. Hadaegh and Babcock's film tracks officials of the Los Angeles Coroner's Office as they discover three anonymous bodies in the various cheap hotel rooms and dingy apartments that ring Hollywood's glamorous core.
The film unfolds with an austere, watchful gaze as coroner's officials attempt to track down surviving family for the three men — Tommy Albertson, Ronald Tanner and Donald Wright — all of whom died, like Hadaegh's neighbor, with no next of kin.
From initial discovery to cremation (shown in unflinching detail), the film finds moments of astounding poignance in the abjection of these men's circumstances. Sifting through paperwork and receipts, the officials discover that Albertson — who lived in poverty in a filthy, cockroach-infested apartment — donated half of his weekly paycheck to a homeless shelter. And Tanner, who meticulously sketched and surveyed his burial plot, eventually buried his lover who died from AIDS in the very grave he had obsessively imagined for himself.
After waiting six months to secure permission to make their film, Hadaegh and Babcock financed A Certain Kind of Death entirely on their own. "It is scary to give up paying work and then start to pour your savings into a project that may never find an audience," admits Hadaegh.
But in the current windfall of interest in the documentary, that gamble may prove worth the risk. The filmmakers have shown A Certain Kind of Death at festivals across the country and are currently negotiating a television debut for the film.
A Certain Kind of Death is just part of an explosion in documentaries, which have an increasingly visible and award-winning presence on the festival and multiplex circuits. Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki's disturbing portrait of a family coping with their father's imprisonment for child molestation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year's Sundance Film Festival. And it has ignited furious buzz with feature articles in The New York Times and The Village Voice. Major distributors like Lion's Gate (Stevie) and United Artists (Bowling for Columbine) no longer view the documentary audience as a niche market, but aims their products at the multiplex. In perhaps one of the biggest coups for the documentary, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine recently set a record for documentary film grosses, raking in a hefty $21 million thus far and proving the genre's profit potential for distributors looking for the next hit documentary.
A Certain Kind of Death was given a special jury award when it premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and it's just one of the numerous documentaries in the Atlanta Film Festival, which this year features more documentaries than American features.
"Documentaries have long been festival fare, but the popularity of series like HBO's 'America Undercover' or Cinemax's 'Reel Life' have brought new attention to reality stories," says Atlanta Film Festival Director Paul Marchant.
Documentaries in previous decades were considered a ghetto of obscurity: obscure themes, obscure filmmakers, shown at obscure venues. Documentaries were considered boring, academic and too far removed from the entertainment value of feature films to hold popular interest. That notion appears to have changed, says Nancy Buirski, executive director and founder of the esteemed annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. "I think the better the documentaries become — and they are better and better made every year — the more people recognize the power in a true story."
A Certain Kind of Death joins a number of powerful docs on the Atlanta Film Festival bill, including Flag Wars, about gentrification battles in Columbus, Ohio, and girlhood, about two teenage girls with violent pasts imprisoned in a facility for juvenile offenders. Like many of the documentaries screening at the Atlanta Film Festival, A Certain Kind of Death investigates people whose lives (and deaths) would be viewed as marginal in most narrative films, but which become part of the compelling web of truth that festival directors Buirski and Marchant speak of.
It is clear from talking to Hadaegh and Babcock that making documentaries is as much an illuminating process for the filmmakers as the finished film is for its viewers. The chance to delve into lives and experiences far different from our own results in a process of discovery that remains one of the genre's most compelling features. For the filmmakers, producing A Certain Kind of Death was a way to address modern alienation. In the bureaucratic treatment of the three dead men in A Certain Kind of Death, the filmmakers find a metaphor for how we deal with people in an increasingly isolated world. "We are very comfortable with the idea of creating institutions that deal with our social problems at a distance," says Babcock. "We would rather not be involved." Like many documentaries, the beauty of A Certain Kind of Death is that two people did get involved and in the process, so do we.
"I think people really are looking for connections, and they're more likely to find those connections around something that's real," says Buirski.