Celebrant of Life

Kirsten, a 68-year-old woman who dedicated her life to midwifery, is trying to break into the business of death, reconnecting to her theatrical roots in her new role as a funeral celebrant.

After decades of midwifery practice and a lecturing job at Oxford Brookes University, Kirsten leaves Oxford in 2016 for Malawi to set up a local skilled birth attendant training programme. In a country with the highest infant mortality rate and designated shelves for dead newborns in the labour ward, the proximity of birth and death is unlike anything in the UK.

After returning to the UK, Kirsten finds herself ruminating on the idea of becoming a funeral celebrant. She completes training and sets out on a new journey. Well, not entirely new; Kirsten has a BA in Theatre and English, and back then she spent most of her undergraduate days "creating theatre and drama in everyday situations." She finds her background to not only have been useful in lecturing, but in funeral celebrancy too. During a funeral one has to ground the audience, bring back the life of the deceased, and aid everyone into a spiritual space with the use of voice alone.

I film Kirsten as she prepares for funerals, calling nursing homes to find out lively details about the personalities of the deceased (like Don, who loved custard and was a bit "cheeky"), writes eulogies, and rehearses her scripts, assigning different elements (fire, water, air, and earth) to various parts of the script so as to give it life.