The Last Rite – Film Review
By Vusi Moloi © 2009
Talking about it is not easy. Treatment of it for documentary purposes is even harder and yet the Canadian film maker Gina Valle succeeds where some have failed. Welcome to The Last Rite, a film documentary about dying, death and grieving. What makes this documentary special and worth your time to view it?
Her common folk approach as well as her ability to draw from her own personal experience of death with respect to her beloved father belie Gina Valle’s impressive scholarly background as a PhD expert in Multicultural Studies a good synthesis that enables her to comfortably navigate an uncharted path in a way that engenders a feeling of calmness and tranquility while her theatre audience is treated to what is otherwise a taboo subject. This is the kind of impression I came away with while attending the premier screening of The Last Rite at the Innis College Theatre Hall in Toronto, Canada last Tuesday. I count myself among the privileged to be invited to the screening.
Youtube Preview Video
The Last Rite - Youtube preview video by soultanis33
Hybrid of Dramatization and Factual Accounts
Using dramatization and real people’s interviews The Last Rite eases you into its subject matter while teaching important lessons about what is death, how to prepare for the inevitability of death and what positive lessons can be learned from it. At the end of the screening and while the credits were still scrolling The Last Rite was given a strong round of applause by its viewers. The director and her crew, who came to the fore, including Executive Producer Ingrid Berzin Leuzy, Director of Photography Nigel Akam, Editor Diane Akam and Nicholas Schnier and others enjoyed the admiration of an enthusiastic audience with another resounding round of applause. No doubt the documentary that took eighteen months in the making and a lot of unrelenting hardwork by the crew was well received.
Honourable Mention From Madeline Ziniak
The Vice-President of OMNI Television who received the highest civilian honour of Order of Canada in July of this year for her work in multicultural media Madeline Ziniak told the audience before the screening that The Last Rite had been funded 100% by the OMNI Television and it was a proud project for her organization as well as the emerging film maker. The highly regarded Madeline Ziniak enjoys excellent rapport with Canada’s multi-ethnic communities. An indefatigable champion of Canada’s diversity and multi-ethnic media, Madeline Ziniak along with the CEO of OMNI Television Leslie Sole once commended this writer for supporting OMNI Television’s quest for licensing with the CRTTC back in 2003. It’s gratifying to see that OMNI has blossomed greatly since those formative years and has strengthened multicultural content by enabling a great documentary project like The Last Rite to see the light of day.
What Makes This Film Attention-Grabbing?
A meticulous Gina Valle with attention to detail delicately weaves an interest-arousing tapestry of personal and other’s real accounts with sobering perspectives of a skillfully enlisted triumvirate of the Islamic Imam Badat, the Buddhist Venerable Hoa and the Hindu Swami Atin Bhattacharya who generously impart their rich insights to show that death does not have to be an exclusively melancholy experience that exacts punishment with its cold shroud of mystery and hurtful silence in our innermost. Gina Valle underscores the value of learning from the viewpoints of others in her website "The Last Rite illustrates how Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists ritualize death. In this documentary we spend time in mosques, Buddhist temples, and ashrams to gain knowledge into the meaning of death and life."
Death can be a means of coming to terms with the core lessons of living and become instrumental in helping us to prepare for its inevitability and the aftermath while providing a cleansing experience. We see this cleansing with the bathing of the dead by the members of the mosque and family members driven by the love of their own in stark contrast to what has become legendary in a modern metropolitan society where the death of a loved one is professionally handled by strangers who take the body away and allow only a restricted and limited access in what is a quantifiable policy by a corporate enterprise driven by profit margins.
Erudite Cast
Gina Valle adds to her erudite cast some of the brightest minds like Dr. Wong an expert on death and dying and University Professor of Psychology, Rev. Michael Marshall a Hospital Chaplain with a clinical pastoral background, Registered Nurse and Palliative Care Worker Lori Ives-Bain and Kala Limbani among many who make The Last Rite documentary an instructive and stimulating experience. This is a must see for all members of the family.
Rush To Find Closure
Modern society is in a rush that we find closure and get over it despite the harsh reality that grieving, the longest stage of bereavement, may last anywhere from many months up to two years and in some cases even longer according to scholars. Having to contend with suddenness of death in my youth, I found this overwhelming experience refusing to go away at first and at the time I lacked the intellectual maturity of reasoning but thankfully with the support of a traditional African village collective the grieving took its own time to crystallize which proved to me that the process of grieving could not be boxed into some clean cut and dry process. This film presents a persuasive case that everyone has his or her own way of dealing with death.
We learn from Gina Valle’s instructive personal experience when she observes “when my father died, there was such an expedient manner in which the death was managed, almost with an eagerness to move the death out of the public eye, and rid us of our sorrow in one sweep.” While pointing out that “death is a treasure” Gina Valle provides a gateway through her fresh lenses to the extremely vital viewpoints of palliative workers, spiritual leaders and health care workers who grapple with the issues of dying and grieving from time to time effectively broadening the vistas of our understanding around this intractable subject while at the same time harnessing and enriching the coping resources which otherwise would remain outside the public view.
OMNI Television Broadcast Times
The Last Rite is produced in the languages of English and Italian. The Italian language boasts the most beautiful and comforting voice of Bertoni Bruna. The 45 minutes long The Last Rite is scheduled to be broadcast on OMNI TV in the two languages of English and Italian as follows:
English
Sunday, October 18, 2009
9:00PM
Italian
Saturday, October 24, 2009
10:00PM
The Organizers of The Last Rite Premier
The following great individuals helped put to together a successful Premier of The Last Rite:
Michelle Alfano
Tom Boreskie
Frank Giorno
Kala Limbani
Jeannie Soultanis
To Learn more about The Last Rite visit Gina Valle website:
www.ginavalle.com on the web.
About the Author
A former South African Television Journalist, Vusi Moloi is a published author of a contextual poetry book, A Goodbye To My Little Troubles, and maintains a blog, Zulumathabo on the Internet.
Talking about it is not easy. Treatment of it for documentary purposes is even harder and yet the Canadian film maker Gina Valle succeeds where some have failed. Welcome to The Last Rite, a film documentary about dying, death and grieving. What makes this documentary special and worth your time to view it?
Her common folk approach as well as her ability to draw from her own personal experience of death with respect to her beloved father belie Gina Valle’s impressive scholarly background as a PhD expert in Multicultural Studies a good synthesis that enables her to comfortably navigate an uncharted path in a way that engenders a feeling of calmness and tranquility while her theatre audience is treated to what is otherwise a taboo subject. This is the kind of impression I came away with while attending the premier screening of The Last Rite at the Innis College Theatre Hall in Toronto, Canada last Tuesday. I count myself among the privileged to be invited to the screening.
Youtube Preview Video
The Last Rite - Youtube preview video by soultanis33
Hybrid of Dramatization and Factual Accounts
Using dramatization and real people’s interviews The Last Rite eases you into its subject matter while teaching important lessons about what is death, how to prepare for the inevitability of death and what positive lessons can be learned from it. At the end of the screening and while the credits were still scrolling The Last Rite was given a strong round of applause by its viewers. The director and her crew, who came to the fore, including Executive Producer Ingrid Berzin Leuzy, Director of Photography Nigel Akam, Editor Diane Akam and Nicholas Schnier and others enjoyed the admiration of an enthusiastic audience with another resounding round of applause. No doubt the documentary that took eighteen months in the making and a lot of unrelenting hardwork by the crew was well received.
Honourable Mention From Madeline Ziniak
The Vice-President of OMNI Television who received the highest civilian honour of Order of Canada in July of this year for her work in multicultural media Madeline Ziniak told the audience before the screening that The Last Rite had been funded 100% by the OMNI Television and it was a proud project for her organization as well as the emerging film maker. The highly regarded Madeline Ziniak enjoys excellent rapport with Canada’s multi-ethnic communities. An indefatigable champion of Canada’s diversity and multi-ethnic media, Madeline Ziniak along with the CEO of OMNI Television Leslie Sole once commended this writer for supporting OMNI Television’s quest for licensing with the CRTTC back in 2003. It’s gratifying to see that OMNI has blossomed greatly since those formative years and has strengthened multicultural content by enabling a great documentary project like The Last Rite to see the light of day.
What Makes This Film Attention-Grabbing?
A meticulous Gina Valle with attention to detail delicately weaves an interest-arousing tapestry of personal and other’s real accounts with sobering perspectives of a skillfully enlisted triumvirate of the Islamic Imam Badat, the Buddhist Venerable Hoa and the Hindu Swami Atin Bhattacharya who generously impart their rich insights to show that death does not have to be an exclusively melancholy experience that exacts punishment with its cold shroud of mystery and hurtful silence in our innermost. Gina Valle underscores the value of learning from the viewpoints of others in her website "The Last Rite illustrates how Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists ritualize death. In this documentary we spend time in mosques, Buddhist temples, and ashrams to gain knowledge into the meaning of death and life."
Death can be a means of coming to terms with the core lessons of living and become instrumental in helping us to prepare for its inevitability and the aftermath while providing a cleansing experience. We see this cleansing with the bathing of the dead by the members of the mosque and family members driven by the love of their own in stark contrast to what has become legendary in a modern metropolitan society where the death of a loved one is professionally handled by strangers who take the body away and allow only a restricted and limited access in what is a quantifiable policy by a corporate enterprise driven by profit margins.
Erudite Cast
Gina Valle adds to her erudite cast some of the brightest minds like Dr. Wong an expert on death and dying and University Professor of Psychology, Rev. Michael Marshall a Hospital Chaplain with a clinical pastoral background, Registered Nurse and Palliative Care Worker Lori Ives-Bain and Kala Limbani among many who make The Last Rite documentary an instructive and stimulating experience. This is a must see for all members of the family.
Rush To Find Closure
Modern society is in a rush that we find closure and get over it despite the harsh reality that grieving, the longest stage of bereavement, may last anywhere from many months up to two years and in some cases even longer according to scholars. Having to contend with suddenness of death in my youth, I found this overwhelming experience refusing to go away at first and at the time I lacked the intellectual maturity of reasoning but thankfully with the support of a traditional African village collective the grieving took its own time to crystallize which proved to me that the process of grieving could not be boxed into some clean cut and dry process. This film presents a persuasive case that everyone has his or her own way of dealing with death.
We learn from Gina Valle’s instructive personal experience when she observes “when my father died, there was such an expedient manner in which the death was managed, almost with an eagerness to move the death out of the public eye, and rid us of our sorrow in one sweep.” While pointing out that “death is a treasure” Gina Valle provides a gateway through her fresh lenses to the extremely vital viewpoints of palliative workers, spiritual leaders and health care workers who grapple with the issues of dying and grieving from time to time effectively broadening the vistas of our understanding around this intractable subject while at the same time harnessing and enriching the coping resources which otherwise would remain outside the public view.
OMNI Television Broadcast Times
The Last Rite is produced in the languages of English and Italian. The Italian language boasts the most beautiful and comforting voice of Bertoni Bruna. The 45 minutes long The Last Rite is scheduled to be broadcast on OMNI TV in the two languages of English and Italian as follows:
English
Sunday, October 18, 2009
9:00PM
Italian
Saturday, October 24, 2009
10:00PM
The Organizers of The Last Rite Premier
The following great individuals helped put to together a successful Premier of The Last Rite:
Michelle Alfano
Tom Boreskie
Frank Giorno
Kala Limbani
Jeannie Soultanis
To Learn more about The Last Rite visit Gina Valle website:
www.ginavalle.com on the web.
About the Author
A former South African Television Journalist, Vusi Moloi is a published author of a contextual poetry book, A Goodbye To My Little Troubles, and maintains a blog, Zulumathabo on the Internet.
posted by Vusi Moloi at
7:16 AM
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