A Will for the Woods

Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, and Brian Wilson (2014, U.S., 93 min.)

Have you given much thought to how you want to be buried? No? Many people don’t! But what does this avoidance of death say about how we view life? How does it impact how we live our lives?

An incredibly intimate documentary, A Will for the Woods chronicles the final months of Clark Wang’s life as he slowly dies from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His last wish? To be given a green burial. Staggering volumes of resources are used each year in burials: more than 1.6 million tons of concrete, 5 million gallons of embalming fluid, and 60,000 tons of steel. This doesn’t include the fuel use and atmospheric emissions of cremation. Wang’s hope is that in death he can improve the health of the planet. Not only does he want a less resource-intensive burial–no embalming, no concrete, no steel–but he might even protect the land in which he is buried in the process, saving a tract of land from clear-cutting. An incredibly humbling narrative about mortality and the lasting legacy we leave, this film asks you reconsider your own relationship to life and death.