More than a year after its IDFA premiere in late 2023, Ömer Sami’s 30-minute documentary Eternal Father is on the Oscar trail. It is one of the 15 titles in contention in the Documentary Short Film category for the 97th Academy Awards.
It has all been quite a journey for a film made as a graduation project by its British director at the National Film School in Denmark.
“Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, Sheffield, Cameraimage,” the director lists just a few of the many prestigious festivals where it has played. The doc qualified for its Oscar run thanks to winning a prize at the Rhode Island International Festival.
“To be honest with you, I never had that in mind. I didn’t even consider that a possibility when I was making it,” Sami says of the title’s emergence as an Oscar hopeful. “Every step has been a wonderful surprise.”
The film’s lengthy festival life is entirely in keeping with its subject matter. This is the story of Nasar Ghafoor, a 59-year-old Virgin Media engineer from Rochdale, UK, who is utterly devoted to his wife and children. Very conscious that he is much older than they are, he wants to preserve his body through cryogenics. That might just give him the chance of coming back to life.
“I think the fact that Nasar is a regular kind of guy from the north of England was appealing to the audience,” the director speculates on why Eternal Father has been received with such warmth and fascination by so many different viewers. “Cryonics on a surface level can be quite shocking to people, and divisive…but people, regardless of their views on cryonics, have been able to relate to Nasar’s life and the things he is going through.”
Viewers anywhere can relate to Nasar’s determination to do everything he can to hold onto the people he most loves. “They are emotional dilemmas that we all go through in some way. And the different ways we deal with our own mortality – I think that has resonated with a wider audience.”
The humour helps too. “What could have been quite a depressing, angst-ridden film seems to have left people feeling quite hopeful at the end,” Sami suggests.
Nasar is not the stereotypical evil billionaire who many associate with cryogenics. He doesn’t have vast financial resources. In one scene, Nasar’s precocious young son Hadji is shown fretting that his father’s obsession with eternal life will bankrupt the family and leave him begging on the streets. This is not the case. The economics are not directly addressed in the film but Sami explains to Business Doc Europe that Nasar is paying for the chance of being preserved in ice through an affordable monthly insurance scheme. “If you were, for example, to die in a car accident and your body is not in a fit state to be preserved, then that money would be paid out to your family instead. The insurance provider wouldn’t take any of that.”
Thanks to a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation, the filmmakers were able to arrange publicity around the film. Meanwhile, thanks to the additional support of the film school t, the director has been able to accompany Eternal Father to many of its international festival screenings.
“The Danish Film School paid for the production of the film. They’ve covered the cost of submitting to festivals. They’ve also covered the travel during this part of the campaign.”
The formidable Sigrid Dyekjær, founder of Real Lava and an Oscar-nominated producer in her own right, has also got behind the film as an exec producer. Sami describes her as “a real powerhouse.”
Even before the IDFA premiere, the director secured the support of the New Yorker documentary strand. This happened after he wrote a speculative email to staff member Daniel Lombroso. “He was really fond of the film and passed it on to his team. Paul Moakley [exec producer at the New Yorker doc strand] was also fond of it.”
Sami himself had initially been worried that Eternal Father was “a little long and a little slow” for an online audience but the New Yorker team reassured him that it would resonate with viewers. Lombroso also encouraged him to submit the film to Oscar qualifying festivals.
“Having them on board has meant that people who know nothing about me [but] appreciate the New Yorker as a brand will watch the film,” the director states. As a die-hard New Yorker subscriber himself, it was especially gratifying to have his work shown on the magazine’s platform.
Nasar’s family turned up in force at the Sheffield premiere last spring. This week, Nasar and his wife are in New York for a Scandinavia House screening of the documentary. “That has been really important for me,” the director says of Nasar. “To have his support and to have him be part of the journey. I think it has been exciting and unexpected for him as well that the journey would continue for so long. The ultimate high point for him was that the film was on Air India, so he said his relatives had no excuse not to see it.”
(The Air India deal was closed by Toronto-based sales agents Ouat Media which specialises in the worldwide sales of international short films and works closely on selected New Yorker titles).
The cryonics industry itself has been a little wary about the film. “It was a bit of an uphill battle to get access to begin with. Their consideration was ‘are we going to go out of our way for a student film?’ I was trying to convince them it was not just a student film and that it would have a wider audience. I feel slightly vindicated that it has reached a wider audience, people outside the cryonics community who knew nothing about it before.”
Now, Sami is close to completing another short documentary on cryogenics – but one that comes at the subject from a very different perspective and that Sami expects may be more warmly received by cryonics specialists. It’s profiling Alan Sinclair, a pioneer in the field and the founder of Cryonics UK. The new doc, Love Immortal, is being made with backing from The Guardian.
“It’s very different in tone and style. It is more archive driven…but still in the same universe,” Sami says of his latest foray into the science of eternal life.
The director is also continuing to work on a feature project, Putting Scott To Rest, about Scott Peake, an inspirational school teacher who created a strange mythology around his own background. (He claimed to be a romantic die-hard Scot when, in fact, he grew up in a council state in south London). This is being produced by Monica Hellstrøm and has just been greenlit by the Danish Film Institute. The aim now is to raise further funding and find a Scottish co-producer.
In the meantime, the road tour with Eternal Father continues. 50 years after the term “cryonics” was first coined and as UK politicians continue to debate assisted dying, it is clear that Sami has found a subject that still has plenty of life left to be squeezed out of it – and that may also have a shot at awards immortality.
