Coffee, Cake & Crematorium

People who choose to be cremated because they don't want to be eaten up by worms haven't done their homework - worms don't live six feet under. And aversion to burning because of the heat is baloney, of course. The German funeral director Karl Schumacher knows that only the Bible is right: It's "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and nothing else. The well-spoken Schumacher is the key figure in this film. He has built up the family company that was founded by his grandfather into a successful business that handles 3,500 bodies a year. Nowadays, simple cremation or burial is passé. His company's website has a section for "mourning chats," and visitors can sign up for a "Kaffeefarht," a trip to a relatively cheap crematorium over the border in the Netherlands, where they can find out more about their future interment. We accompany them on their day out. Scenes from the trip are interspersed with interviews at the homes of people taking part, in which they talk (or argue) about their thoughts on death. But it is Schumacher who steals the show with his detached attitude to death and the unresolved trauma of his own father's demise: "An undertaker who commits suicide isn't good publicity."