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Death is always a touchy subject, especially without the details.  In this year’s Opening Gala feature at the Female Eye Film Festival, Penelope Buitenhuis’ A Wake held nothing back when it came to delving into the deeper recesses of human emotion and mortality.

When esteemed director Gabor Zazlov (Nicholas Campbell) dies suddenly, the members of his theatre company are called together for a weekend at his country home. There, layers of issues past come undone as they try to sort their feelings towards Gabor’s death.  Spearheaded by his widow Hanna (Tara Nicodemo) and Gabor’s estranged son Chad (Kristopher Turner), whose arrival was as unprecedented as his father’s death, the weekend forces the members of the company to confront secrets that haunt both their past and subsequent present. In the process, they try to stage a production of Hamlet that never got to see the light of day.

In lieu of memorizing a script, Buitenhuis and Sutton wrote A Wake to be improvised by the actors, which gave a very realistic feeling to the film. Bhajera, the resident Shakespeare expert of the group said that the improvisation helped with the relax atmosphere that translates easily across the screen. According to him, the only thing to watch out for in improvisation is not talking during another actor’s close up and avoiding clunking cutlery during a scene. Even more surprising is that the whole film took only ten days to film in a place actually called Yee Haw Adventure Farm.

The improvisation, successfully used, seems to be a reflection of how death translates in true life. Unlike other rituals in life such as birth (which you can prepare for with lamaze classes) or weddings (which are perfected through rehearsals), no amount of preparation is suffice to cope with death. In the end, improvisation is the most appropriate tool, if any even exists to deal with death.