Gravehopping

Pero works as a funeral speaker in a small Slovenian town. His job is to make every funeral a little special. But his eulogies keep turning, in spite of him, into personal confessions. What he says is witty and out of place; it brings the crowd to tears for reasons that have nothing to do with grief. The town both loves him and is wary of him. The film shows death not as a solemn ceremony but as part of daily life. How a town remembers its own dead is the real subject. Comedy and sadness sit in the same scenes. Gregor Bakovič and Brane Gruber appear in Jan Cvitkovič’s hundred and three minute film, a joint Slovenian and Croatian production, completed in 2005.