Life, death, and ‘spa treatments’ for the dead – a young Chinese mortician learns her trade
Documentary Almost Heaven follows a 17-year-old trainee mortician as she overcomes her fear of handling corpses and learns how to cut their hair, shave their faces and wash their limbs
Death is not a topic most people tend to dwell on, but it is something British filmmaker Carol Salter wanted to explore in her documentary Almost Heaven, which follows a 17-year-old apprentice mortician in Changsha, a city in Hunan province in central China.
The film, which depicts the “spa treatments” given to the deceased at Chinese funeral homes, will be screened on Tuesday at the Asia Society in Hong Kong.
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“My kind of motivation was to deal with my own fear of death,” says Salter, speaking from London, where she is based. “My parents were getting on and I was petrified. I wondered if I could exist without them.”
Salter, who is in her 50s, came across a brief article about young Chinese morticians who perform beauty treatments on the deceased to bring them respect and honour in death. She was so intrigued that she made her first trip to China in 2013 to see the process for herself.
The documentary was shot at the Changsha Ming Yuan Mountain Funeral Home, reportedly one of the largest of its kind in China. The opening scenes show long, dimly lit hallways, staff driving coffins around in golf carts, and draped corpses being transported on hydraulic lifting machines to be stored in floor-to-ceiling storage spaces.
At first, Salter thought of following a group of young morticians, but then realised it would be more meaningful to follow the journey of a single person. She connected with Zhan Yingling, originally from Mianyang in Sichuan province, who had never seen a corpse before, and was afraid of the dark and ghosts.