Glasgow Film Festival 2015: Tender
The volunteers and staff of the Port Kembla Community Centre, located in a economically depressed Australian steel town on the stunning New South Wales coast, have a small yet revolutionary idea: taking the business out of the funeral business. Lynette Wallworth’s low-key yet moving documentary follows them through the process of forming a sort of mortuary co-op, with the goal of holding not-for-profit funerals in order to reduce costs, make burial and cremation more natural, and return the personal, hands-on element to funerals as a way of coping with grief.
The pacing is slow and there isn’t much of a dramatic hook, but Tender’s insistence on capturing “ordinary” people simply doing good for each other is refreshing – this is not a flashy exposé, but a snapshot of a tight-knit community coming together in mutual love and support. Featuring a bittersweet score by Nick Cave, Tender captures a beautiful sense of the power and peace that comes from what it feels like to belong, even in death.