Gates of Heaven

Two pet cemeteries in California. One is closing and the buried animals have to be moved; the other is trying to expand. The film lets the owners, the staff and the people who buried their animals talk. It is not interested in love of animals. It is interested in how people narrate their own lives: the longer the camera runs, the more everyone brings the subject back to themselves, and the story of a dead cat turns into a summary of a career or a family reckoning. Errol Morris never intervenes; he simply lets it run. The form is fixed frames and flat interviews: nobody is steered, there is no narration and almost no music. Both the comedy and the sadness come out of that distance. The film exists because of a bet. Werner Herzog told Morris, who was then struggling to finish anything, that if he completed the pet cemetery documentary and screened it publicly he would eat his own shoe. Morris finished it and showed it at Berkeley, and Herzog cooked his shoe for five hours in garlic, onion, duck fat, rosemary and hot sauce and ate it. Les Blank recorded the occasion in a short film called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Who it is for: viewers who like observational documentary and the particular storytelling of provincial America. Who it is not for: anyone looking for structure. The film is deliberately scattered, nobody ties their story off, and the subject is not really the animals.