Der Weg nach Eden

Sober and ruthless documentary, less suitable for sensitive viewers. Robert Adrian Pejo follows the everyday work of János Keserü. Keserü works as mortician and pathologist at a hospital in Budapest where elderly terminal patients are nursed. The law in Hungary states that the cause of death has to be established for every patient that dies. So all corpses have to be meticulously dissected, no appendage remains untouched. Keserü learned the skill of cutting up corpses (and sawing and drilling) from his father. He has worked with death all his life and that experience has led him to develop his own views on the transience of life. He is consumed by the question of the afterlife and how people can prepare for death. His skill is especially impressive when he demonstrates how he can put back the pieces to form a complete corpse that can be displayed during the funeral. Pejo and his cameraman Wolfgang Lehner filmed the activities of Keserü as coolly and educationally as possible – a kind of present-day equivalent of the historical painting of anatomy lessons – but the pictures they collected in this way are often more gruesome than in many a splatter movie. Nothing is more normal than a corpse in contemporary cinema, but Pejo shows that just an ordinary corpse – a real corpse – is a little different. His film is primarily about the closeness of death (and hence of life) in cinema.