Event: The Passing On: Award-Winning Documentary Screening & Director Q/A

“The Passing On” is a documentary film featuring James Bryant, former National Embalmer of the Year, who hopes a promising mortuary student will overlook his feelings of rejection within the African American community to continue within the disappearing tradition of Black funeral funeral homes.

This beautiful, poetic documentary explores some of society’s most challenging and fraught transitional spaces. In the words of the jury panelists who awarded this film the highest honor at the Wisconsin Film Festival, “The Passing On encompasses so many transitions and their repercussions: the passing on of a trade and a tradition, a Black community facing gentrification, the shifting tides of LGBTQ acceptance, the ache of growing into one’s vocation and confidence, and, of course, the transition of the body itself from life to death. This is an unassumingly beautiful film and a real accomplishment.”

Local award-winning filmmaker John Harrison will moderate a Q/A with the film’s director Nathan Clarke following the screening.