When death goes viral
Filmmaker Tarryn Crossman’s second documentary film, Timelines, a story about death in the digital age, will premiere at the Durban International Film Festival next week. After her acclaimed first film Fatherland, which followed the struggles of three young Afrikaner boys at a Kommandokorps boot camp, Crossman’s new film documents an entirely different subject — the relationship between teenagers, the internet and death in a story about three girls who document their various forms and stages of death on the internet. who gives me the right to this information if these girls aren’t here to consent? So in a weird way the film itself is uncomfortable to watch, because you wonder if you have the right to access these spaces. Fatherland was shot in nine days and edited over three months, on and off. This film was shot over a year and with all the archive material and graphics it has taken us about six months to put it all together. This was also an intensely personal film to make and hard stories to craft. I don’t really know. From Kaileigh, I think you see how complicated the relationship is between these digital shrines and saying goodbye.
When you see this bucket-list story compared with the reality of grief, it makes you ask what is real about the things we like and share online. But does that make Kaileigh’s bucket list any less inspiring?
And then Amber’s story really shows how scary social media can be and how complicated bullying is. Jen’s is more about the positive power of social media: she changed the face of organ donation in South Africa. Her #getmeto21 campaign increased organ donation by 287%. When she started only 0.03% of South Africans were organ donors. But this campaign and the blogs and the song and everything was also her safety net against just being sick and facing her own mortality alone.
I think the film is trying to show that there is so much more to these stories that go viral — there are complicated humans on the other end of the headlines. could go through. And even though they were all in such a hard place, they just welcomed us completely.
We cried and ate and watched TV with them, but we also made them relive all this hard stuff. So we shot over a period of time and would try also to give the families as much space as possible. going to be announcing some international festivals soon and I would like to do screenings in Cape Town and Johannesburg at independent cinemas. We will have all the dates on our website or Facebook.