Baltimore Women's Film Festival 2008

It's better to go with a bang! Someone named Margaret Rutger is being buried, and while going about their work, two gravediggers, Fred and Keiko, play their usual game of imagining how she died, based on hints in the obit. As the storytelling proceeds, the stories take on personal significance. Fred's a middle-aged expatriot Brit who sees his own failures reflected in Keiko's youthful nihilism. He tries, with his tales and commentary, to convince her to repair her ruptured relationship with her mother. Tough, self-sufficient Keiko resists both his argument and the paternal impulse behind it, and their competing stories develop into an existential dialectic about one's approach to life given the fact of an inevitable, yet unpredictable death.