Corpus Camera

Filmed in the dramatic, isolated northern landscape of Iceland, this 56-minute documentary explores the process of death and grief through personal post-mortem photography. In Corpus Camera, we meet Icelanders who have chosen to document very personal experiences of death and loss through photography. An older couple reveal funeral photos of their long-dead son who died tragically young. After 30 years, the photos still elicit painful differences between a grieving mother and her stoic husband. A housewife living in the harsh and isolated west fjords keeps funeral photos of a terrible family tragedy. They mark a profound event which forever changed her and which belong side by side with photos of weddings, confirmations and baptisms. A man and his stepdaughter, after nursing his wife through a long battle with cancer, use photography to record her on her deathbed, in peace at last. And a woman, morbidly fascinated with funerals and wakes, compulsively videotapes acquaintances family funerals as a bulwark against her own fear of death. By displaying and viewing these images, the subjects re-live moments of intense personal loss, and in the process of remembering, they meditate on the nature of their own mortality. Archival photographs of corpses and funerals spanning 100 years demonstrate the largely unacknowledged, yet common practice of post mortem photography by the public.