Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality
Starring: Sam Keen, Robert Jay Lifton, Sheldon Solomon
Director: Patrick Shen
The film: OK, so the title alone is a giveaway that this is no animated feature voiced by Hollywood's finest. Filmmakers Patrick Shen and Greg Bennick put cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Denial of Death at the heart of their documentary.
The premise is that our fear of death and our own mortality has shaped the world as we know it since time began. In particular, it's our knowledge that one day it will all end that sets us apart from other living creatures, shapes our culture and is the prime motivation behind everything, from how we behave in the workplace to acts of aggression and violence towards other human beings.
Pushing this barrow are a collection of suitably attired, and predictably hirsute, American thinkers, including Sam Keen, Robert Jay Lifton and the superb Sheldon Solomon (below right). These intellectual heavyweights have been carrying out studies for years on the basis of Becker's thoughts - and, after a slow start, the film - with deadpan narration from Gabriel Byrne - really grabs you.