A CERTAIN KIND OF DEATH
Blue Hadaegh, Grover Babcock
USA 2003, 69 min.
www.acertainkindofdeath.com

It sometimes starts with a stench, coming from a hotel room. Someone complains to the landlord. He let’s himself in and finds a corpse, alone and dead for weeks. Meet one of the stars of A Certain Kind of Death.
What happens to unclaimed and sometimes unidentifiable corpses? With stark directness, presenting images unprecedented and indelible, Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock let the procedure for dealing with this obscure but fundamental issue speak for itself.

The film doesn’t blink at showing the sometimes bloated and/or decomposed bodies of loners found in dingy apartments or cheap hotel rooms, sometimes long after death; the film’s most comically human moment stems from such a scene, in which an attractive blond police officer, occupied with a particularly unwieldy corpse, takes a personal call on her cell phone and says, “Wrapping a body. What are you doing?”

The film presents the grisly subject with discretion, tact and respect for the deceased who mostly fell through society’s cracks, and often end up in the modern equivalent of a common paupers’ grave.
Hadaegh and Babcock clearly went to considerable lengths to gain the trust and cooperation of their workaday subjects, who can scarcely ever have imagined that what they do would earn them a place in the movies.

In attendance: Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock

WITH:

I PROMISE AFRICA
Jerry A. Henry, 2003, USA, 3 min
djbisko@hotmail.com

CAREER SUICIDE
Dan Huber and Alex Kang, 2003, USA, 13 min
dhuber1@nyc.rr.com