Gates of Heaven
Death is for the living and not for the dead so much.
Synopsis
Gates of Heaven (1978) is Errol Morris's debut documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The hook sounds mundane: a pet cemetery in California goes bust, and hundreds of buried animals have to be dug up and moved elsewhere.
What Morris does with that is something else entirely. He simply points the camera and lets people talk — the owners of a rendering plant, the failed idealist behind the first cemetery, an elderly woman who drifts into a mesmerizing monologue about her own life, and the family building a fresh resting place for the pets. They speak about love and loss and meaning, ostensibly about cats and dogs, really about themselves.
No narration, no music cues, just faces and words. Roger Ebert championed the film for decades, and Werner Herzog famously lost a bet over whether it would ever get finished — then cooked and ate his own shoe to settle the score. Quiet, deadpan and strangely profound. Stream Gates of Heaven (1978) online on iFILM.
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