Tell My Friends That I’m Dead

Kirtadze introduces perhaps her most astounding film, an intimate look at western Georgia’s elaborate mourning rituals, thusly: “The dead are not separated from the living. People involve them in their family life, talk to them, seek their advice . . . The family is never alone.” Then she disappears behind her camera for a nonjudgmental look at some intensely personal scenes of family and friends dressing a recently deceased husband and discussing what to buy for him to take on his journey, or people crashing a car through a wall so that it can be the decorated coffin of a beloved son.