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Nice Places to Die

Germany 2015 / Documentary / 105 minutes / Director: Bernd Schaarmann / Parental guidance

Director's Commentary

»How does one live with death as a companion, or more precisely, how does one endure the profession as an undertaker?

I pursued this question a few years ago, from which my film "Living and Dying in Castrop-Rauxel" was developed. Until now I was of the opinion that my parents and I lived quite closely with death. But believe me, it gets even closer. Correction, much closer. Because in some places in the world, being close to the dead is somewhat different.

A life as an undertaker's child was always normal for me and today I consider it a gift to have grown up like that. For most people, "my normality" is exotic at best – but for the viewers of "Living and Dying in Castrop-Rauxel" it became clear that an everyday, especially humorous approach to death is quite possible. Especially the humour of my father, which helped him to endure his job, led to the fact that the viewers in the film were also able to bear the sad moments; often it was only afterwards that they understood how intensively they had dealt with death, even laughed about it.

Why am I writing this?

Because I want to keep doing the same. Because I want to use my native and maybe just because of that my naive view again to tell about life and death. This time with a focus on the people who live and work at the cemetery, who have their home near and in the graves.

The closeness of the living to death, the serious and at the same time humorous ways of dealing with it, is central for me. At my father's funeral, the pastor had already succeeded in conjuring up a smile on the faces of the mourners in the church. That was a good thing. And it was all the more good that we had laid out my father in the living room for four days beforehand, so that everyone could say goodbye to him personally one last time. What used to be normal is unimaginable for many people in Germany today – the corpse of the dead in the circle of the living.

My last film opened with the words: "I'm Bernd and I'm an undertaker's child." I took the audience with me to the places of my childhood. Now, with my film "Nice Places To Die", I would like to invite them to visit more distant places with me, to meet people who stand for a somewhat "different" approach to death and who, precisely because of this, have a lot to tell about life.«

Bernd Schaarmann