What is death? This is one of the questions asked in Ömer Sami’s wry new documentary Eternal Father, about Nasar Ghafoor, a Virgin Media engineer from Rochdale who wants to live forever. Dying is defined in many different ways: clinical and legal among them. Some, including Nasar, refuse to accept these definitions.
Nasar is in his late 50s. His wife is more than 20 years younger than him. He is still deeply affected by his mum’s passing away. Now, he wants to give himself at least a chance of eternal life through cryonic preservation ,but his kids are sceptical. He’ll be placed in an ice bath, his blood will be drained away and replaced with antifreeze – then his body will be taken to Michigan and stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll get to live again.
The new film (an international premiere in IDFA’s Youth Documentary competition) deals with profound subject matter in a light-hearted way. The Danish-based, UK-raised filmmaker came across Nasar after attending several meetings of Cryonics UK, an organisation which usually closes its doors to the media.
“At the last meeting I went to, Nasar was there with his entire family. There was something about the fact that he had brought his children along to the meeting, which was unusual, and the openness between them…it went from there really.”
The family gave Sami complete access to their lives. “It is always important for me to spend as much time off camera as on camera with my participants,” the director reflects on the bond he built with Nasar, his wife and children. He was even able to persuade them to be filmed underwater.
“I was very open with them and said I wanted to find a way of representing this state [of being preserved after death]. Obviously, I couldn’t film the process but I wanted a way to activate the viewers’ imagination. They were all up for playing along – and they also had fun while doing it.”
Nasar is a genial and engaging figure but takes eternal life very seriously. “It was important to me to find someone who had made this decision out of personal necessity and not just an interest in some kind of technological advancement.”
It helped that he wasn’t the typical mad scientist type.
“There were some people I met who fulfilled the stereotype of what you imagined a cryonicist might look like,” Sami notes of the oddball characters he encountered at the cryonics meetings. Nasar was much easier to relate to. “The humour [in the film] comes from him…his face I found very expressive.”
Sami has followed a circuitous route into filmmaking. He originally studied psychology at UCLA. He was interested in “consciousness and what it is like to be another person,” but grew frustrated by the rigid thinking he encountered in academia. Documentary, he discovered, allowed him to “convey something emotionally from a person’s lived experience.” As part of his psychology degree, he had spent a semester abroad in Denmark. He fell in love and ended moving to the country and enrolling at the National Film School of Denmark.
The New Yorker has already picked up Eternal Father. It is expected to be made available worldwide on the magazine’s site early next year. In the meantime, Sami is already hard at work on a feature doc which he is making with producer Monica Hellstrøm (whose previous credits include award winners like Flee and A House Made of Splinters). He first met Hellstrøm nine years ago when he was an intern at Final Cut For Real. (He worked on projects like Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look Of Silence and Simon Lereng Wilmont’s The Distant Barking Of Dogs).
In the new film with Hellstrøm, Putting Scott To Rest, Sami investigates the “myth” behind a legendary school teacher at private school Bedales (which he attended). Dr Scott Peake was known as the “Indiana Jones of Scotland” and had spun a colourful mythology about his background, claiming he grew up on the west coast and had played cricket for Scotland. In fact, Scott, who died in 2019, was from a council estate in south-east London. His brothers are going on a road trip to Scotland to spread his ashes and Sami will be accompanying them.
“It’s not the classic true crime or conman story. He was a qualified teacher. He had a PHD and was very inspirational. Somehow, it was out of personal necessity that he created this alternative persona. He didn’t do anyone any harm, I would argue.”
As for Eternal Life, what does the director think about cryonics? Would he ever consider putting himself into the deep freeze? “Not that solution specifically…but to me the film is about time and the fact that we only have 4000 weeks on earth. I am constantly aware about the passing of time – all the books I haven’t read and the knowledge I haven’t gained. In some sense, perhaps the film is my own attempt at immortality…”
