With its emphasis on cutting and close-ups, the very language of filmmaking is anatomical.

Given the fact, the subject matter of Robert-Adrian Pejo's latest documentary is more cinematic than it may first seem.

It's an intimate look at the life and work of a certain Janus Keseru.

What puts a shiver down the spines of many viewers is that Keseru is a mortician and pathologist working in a hospital in Budapest where elderly, terminally ill patients spend their last few weeks.

Hungarian law states that cause of death must always be established, so Keseru saws, drills and chops, peels back skin and looks under eyelids, in his bid to work out why any given body stopped functioning.

Once he has finished pulling a corpse apart, he puts it together again so it can be displayed during the funeral.

Pejo's approach is cold and sober. He observes Keseru with the same detached fascination that the mortician shows for each fresh corpse on the slab.

Yes, there is something grim and macabre about Pejo's film, but in its own quiet, morbid way, it asks profound questions about life, death, and how both are represented in cinema.

Geoffrey Macnab

Prod co: Prisma Film

Prod: Michael Seeber, Heinz Stussak

Dir/scr/ed: Robert Adrian-Pejo

Ph: Wolfgang Leher

Running time: 80 mins

Screening: 27 June, 15.00, Praha; 28 June, 22.00, Praha maly

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