Meanwhile on Earth

When we die, there are still some practicalities that need to be taken care of before our time among the living is finally over. Swedish director Carl Olsson leads us on a stately tour through the ordinary workplaces that lie behind our final encounter with the ineffable. Shades of wry Nordic humour emerge as the existential meets the mundane and the ritualistic meets the routine, in this contemplative yet oddly comforting film about the death industry.

‘I am usually intrigued by places and phenomena that I in some way find strange or alienated. I think it’s interesting to emphasise the strangeness of the phenomena and at the same time create compassion and empathy for the characters who produce and are re-produced by the same. At the boundary between the comprehensible human and a strange phenomenon, a deeper understanding of our human tendencies and behavioural patterns is facilitated. For me, the strangeness of the industry surrounding death arises when the simplicity of everyday life emerges in a context that we always have looked upon as immune to the concerns of everyday life because of its existential character. In this way the strangeness experienced on the screen has the possibility of moving from the filmic room to ourselves and our society and forces us to question our own relationship with the definite end.’

Carl Olsson, Director