Departing Gesture
2019 · 11m · United States
Directed by Brian Bolster, Jonathan Napolitano
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At the Sebrell Funeral Home in Ridgeland, Mississippi, director Trey Sebrell tends solitary funerals and burials for H.I.V./AIDS patients abandoned by their families — a restrained observational portrait of dignity extended to the dead.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a funeral film to wring catharsis from grief, but Bolster and Napolitano refuse the emotional payoff — they just watch Trey do his work, and somehow that refusal becomes the most radical thing here.
This is observational documentary in the lineage of Wiseman and the Maysles: a film that trusts formal restraint and spatial composition to do the moral work, letting dignity accumulate through the simple act of bearing witness without ornament.
The film's entire power lives in a single decision: to never cut away from Trey's hands as he tends the body, letting that single frame hold both the labor and the tenderness in a way that one edit break would have shattered.
Reviews
"Departing Gesture," the first film in The New Yorker's new series highlighting short documentaries, sheds light on this story patiently and with care. The restrained camerawork subtly heightens the contrast between life and death, movement and stillness.