Over My Dead Body

The title encapsulates the film to come: a healthy dose of joke and jest infused into very serious, life-and-death-and-the-meaning-of-it-all content. “What else to do but dance?” a close friend and collaborator of Dave St. Pierre’s declares, summarizing the film’s raw, honest, staying-with-the-trouble take on what it means to face death, and, very concretely, to engage in a process of dying. What is a body for, anyways? How do we spend our bodies, our energies, our lives? These are all questions that screamed out at me, watching the incredible vulnerability and tenderness that Over My Dead Body brings forth through an intimate journey of creation, of being, of becoming, and of unbecoming.

This chronicle of how to live through disappointment and despair, how to keep going, to hold on, to have hope amidst such very potent and real illness and loss, in a film about a man struggling for literal breath, takes on a new level of meaning from the vantage point of 2022. Many traditions around the world consider the lungs to be the seat of our grief; walking with St. Pierre as he trails his metal oxygen canister on wheels behind him through the streets of Montreal winter, one cannot help but feel the very palpable urgency and deep will to live that this film gifts us. May it help us gather the courage to make it through another pandemic winter together.

Aurora Prelević
Writer, performance maker, cinephile