A documentary crew captured the oddly hilarious grace of the staff of a New York funeral home at the outbreak of a pandemic.
. In the early days of 2020, as a new contagious virus began to circulate inside the United States and deaths piled up, there wasn’t much to laugh about. Across the country, store shelves were emptied in fits of panic buying before once busy areas fell silent altogether as people were ordered or chose to stay home, in turn leading to countless livelihoods being destroyed and educations disrupted.
“When we got there, it was already very bad,” Bowie Alexander, one of the film’s directors, tells The Daily Beast. “It always seemed really bad up until the end. At like three months into it, which was June, was when the first wave in New York was ending. But we got in there April 3, and they had too many bodies. They couldn’t take any more. It continued to be that way up until the very end of shooting.
Alexander’s film begins with a shot inside the funeral home’s chapel which, out of grim necessity, had been converted into a storage area filled with rows of cardboard boxes—marked with “handle with extreme care”—containing bodies. The staff squabble among themselves about who should have to be tasked with calling up a family and telling them, due to a mix up at a hospital, their relative’s body has gone missing.
As well as the seam of gallows humor which runs throughout the documentary, the film also shows the unimaginable pressure placed on those tasked with dealing with the pandemic’s worst consequences. Joe Neufeld Sr. tells a news camera crew that his funeral home is starting work at “seven in the morning, and we go to midnight every night.” “We’re dealing with bodies, we’re not conducting services,” Jay says later. “We’re not having full funerals. We’re just dealing with body disposal.
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