De función
2007 · 28m · España
Directed by Jorge Tur Moltó
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark
In a funeral home, death can become everyday and routine; it is also the space of a staging — a look behind the scenes where the funeral rite is prepared.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people avert their eyes from funeral homes; Moltó just... watches, refuses the easy sentimentality, and somehow that refusal becomes the whole point — it's perverse in the best way, treating death prep like a job site and finding something stranger in the mundane than any horror film could.
De función positions itself squarely in the essay-documentary tradition, using rigorous observation and formal restraint to excavate the ritual logic of a liminal space; the editing rhythm and tonal control show a filmmaker working inside a lineage of contemplative cinema while earning every moment of its 28 minutes.
The decision to keep the camera still and let the funeral home workers simply *exist* in frame, unbothered by its presence, is what transforms this from sociology into cinema — there's a specific trust between filmmaker and subject that makes the everyday suddenly breathable.