Calendar
0
Login / Register
Donate
Login/Register

Movies, Documentaries, and Short Films

Clear
Resources are organized by topic and listed alphabetically. An Instructor Recommended label identifies resources specifically recommended by a Center for Death Education instructor.

Documentaries / True Stories

Card image
Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America
An exploration of the changing attitudes in the United States surrounding death, including the ways it is recognized today and how many approach the end of life.
Learn More
Card image
The Bridge
Filmmakers use hidden cameras to capture the various suicide attempts at the Golden Gate Bridge - the world's most popular suicide destination. Interviews with the victims' loved ones describe their lives and mental health.
Learn More
Card image
A Certain Kind of Death
Unblinking and unsettling, this documentary lays bare a mysterious process that goes on all around us - what happens to people who die with no next of kin.
Learn More
Card image
Dreams of a Life
A filmmaker sets out to discover the life of Joyce Vincent, who died in her bedsit in North London in 2003. Her body wasn't discovered for three years, and newspaper reports offered few details of her life - not even a photograph.
Learn More
Card image
Dying Wish
The story of Michael Miller, an eighty-year old, retired surgeon with end-stage pancreatic cancer who chose to stop eating and drinking to hasten and ease his death.
Learn More
Card image
End Game
End Game weaves together three stories of visionary medical providers who practice on the cutting edge of life and death, helping to change the way we think about living and dying.
Learn More
Card image
End of Life
A deeply moving and revelatory documentary, End of Life from filmmakers John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik captures the last years of five individuals in the process of dying.
Learn More
Card image
Extremis
Witness the wrenching emotions that accompany end-of-life decisions as doctors, patients and families in a hospital ICU face harrowing choices.
Learn More
Card image
Facing Death / Being Mortal - Frontline
Frontline (TV) examined the difficult and emotional decisions that families confront when their loved one is gravely ill, and the complicated reality of dying in an era of modern medicine.
Learn More
Card image
A Family Undertaking
A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home.
Learn More
Card image
Gates of Heaven
A documentary about a pet cemetery in California, and the people who have pets buried there.
Learn More
Card image
A Good Death
What do you do when you're told you're going to die? In this heart-rending documentary four Australians face this very question, as they search for that elusive good death.
Learn More
Card image
Griefwalker
Griefwalker is an extraordinary portrait of Harvard-trained theologian Stephen Jenkinson, who teaches that death empowers us to live and that we must know grief well in order to appreciate our own lives
Learn More
Card image
Hope Frozen
A Thai scientist and his family decide to cryonically freeze their cherished, dying toddler. This heartfelt documentary follows their journey.
Learn More
Card image
How to Die in Oregon
Documents stories of terminally ill Oregonians utilizing legal physician-assisted suicide, their loved ones, doctors involved, and passage of a similar law in Washington. Explores perspectives around this ethically complex issue.
Learn More
Card image
The Last Ecstatic Days
Ethan Sisser, a young man with terminal brain cancer, sits alone in his hospital room. When he starts livestreaming his death journey on social media, thousands of people around the world join to celebrate his courage. Still, Ethan envisions more – to teach the world how to die without fear. To do that, he needs to film his death.
Learn More
Card image
Serving Life
Actor Forest Whitaker narrates the story of a group of inmate volunteers who staff their own hospice inside a maximum security prison in Louisiana where the average sentence is more than 90 years.
Learn More
Card image
Speaking Grief
Moving away from the idea that grief is a problem that needs to be “fixed,” Speaking Grief validates the experience of grievers and guides those wishing to support them.
Learn More
Card image
Still Loved
Still Loved examines the complexity and reality of families surviving stillbirth and baby loss. This is a brave inclusive and ultimately life affirming film, for anyone that has ever, or will ever, lose someone they love.
Learn More
Card image
Take Me Out Feet First
A documentary series profiling 25 extraordinary terminally ill people, in unimaginable circumstances, who have taken control of how they will die.
Learn More
Card image
The Undertaking
A behind the scenes look at a funeral home as an undertaker and his family care for both the living and the dead.
Learn More
Card image
A Will for the Woods
Award-winning environmental documentary about the green burial movement. Determined that his last act will be a gift to the planet, musician and psychiatrist Clark Wang prepares for his own green burial.
Learn More
Card image
Zen and the Art of Dying
Zenith Virago is an activist and educator who for over 20 years has been returning the coastal region of Byron Bay, Australia to a more communal, celebratory, and creative engagement with death and dying.
Learn More

New Perspectives

Card image
The Bucket List
Two men nearing the end of their lives find themselves in the same hospital room. After creating a list of things to achieve before death, they leave the hospital against the doctor’s orders and set out to fulfill the items on their bucket lists.
Learn More
Card image
Clouds
Based on real events, a young musician discovers his cancer has spread, leaving him just a few months to live. With limited time, he follows his dream and makes an album, unaware that it will soon be a viral music phenomenon.
Learn More
Card image
Running on Empty
Follows Mort who discovers he has less than a year to live, and after his fiancé leaves him, he meets Kate in a dating service that matches people by their death dates, all while being stalked by a disturbed pimp.
Learn More
Card image
Tuesday
A mother and her teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird. A heart-rending tale about the echoes of loss and finding resilience in the unexpected.
Learn More

Grief and Grieving

Card image
Amour
Georges and Anne are an octogenarian couple. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
Learn More
Card image
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
This prestige drama follows a nine-year-old boy who finds a mysterious key that once belonged to his father, a victim of the September 11th terrorist attacks. With childhood determination and inventiveness, the boy sets out on a quest to find what secrets the key unlocks as well as make sense of the loss of his father.
Learn More
Card image
Good Grief
Good Grief is a bittersweet film, sensitively handled as it masterfully explores the emotions that come with death, infidelity, friendship, love.
Learn More
Card image
If Anything Happens I Love You
In the aftermath of tragedy, two grieving parents journey through an emotional void as they mourn the loss of a child.
Learn More
Card image
A Man Called Otto
Otto is a grump who's given up on life following the loss of his wife and wants to end it all. When a young family moves in nearby, he meets his match in quick-witted Marisol, leading to a friendship that will turn his world around.
Learn More
Card image
Manchester by the Sea
A depressed uncle is asked to take care of his teenage nephew after the boy's father dies.
Learn More
Card image
My Girl
An irresistible story of first love and loss. 11-year-old Vada has an obsession with death, and for good reasons - her mother died during childbirth, and her father runs a funeral service from their home.
Learn More
Card image
Ordinary People
Tormented by guilt following the death of his older brother, Buck, in a sailing accident, alienated teenager Conrad Jarrett attempts suicide. Returning home following an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital, Conrad tries to deal with his mental anguish and also reconnect with his mother and father.
Learn More
Card image
Return to Zero
The story of a couple who discover just before their due date that their son has died in the womb and will be stillborn.
Learn More
Card image
Summer 1993
After her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.
Learn More
Card image
Yonder
Set in the not-too-distant future, grieving widower Jaehyun receives an invitation from his late wife Yi-hoo to a virtual world called Yonder, a place created based on his wife's memories.
Learn More

Cultural

Card image
Barking Water
Frankie is dying. Irene hasn't forgiven him. And they are racing against time to find their way home. Frankie needs help and Irene is the one he turns to. He must go home one last time.
Learn More
Card image
Children of the Pyre
This documentary follows the life of Seven children who are working under extreme conditions at India's busiest cremation ground, Manikarnika in Banaras.
Learn More
Card image
City of a Million Dreams
New Orleans jazz funerals and second-line parades absorb the pain of death and racism, soaring to transcendent rebirth. But a hurricane and a parade shooting plunge Michael White and Deb
Learn More
Card image
Coco
Miguel embarks on an extraordinary journey to the magical land of his ancestors. There, the charming trickster Hector becomes an unexpected friend who helps Miguel uncover the mysteries behind his family’s stories and traditions.
Learn More
Card image
Departures
A newly unemployed cellist takes a job performing “encoffination” of the dead prior to cremation. A story of love, of discovery, of revelation and of the transcending human spirit.
Learn More
Card image
The Farewell
In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai, has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai Nai herself.
Learn More
Card image
Four Sheets to the Wind
An endearing, comic and eternally universal love and death story set among the modern traditions of the Oklahoma Indian.
Learn More
Card image
H.H. Dalai Lama: Facing Death and Dying Well
The Dalai Lama teaching about the truth of suffering, the Three Characteristics of Existence and the dissolution of the body's elements at death. His Holiness encourages us to develop our awareness of death and move from gross understanding to more subtle levels.
Learn More
Card image
Homegoings
Homegoings takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration.
Learn More
Card image
Ikiru
Mr. Watanabe suddenly finds that he has terminal cancer. He vows to make his final days meaningful.
Learn More
Card image
My Love, Don’t Cross That River
89-year-old Kang Gye-Yeol and 98-year-old Jo Byeong-Man are married and have lived together for 76 years. While Kang and Jo spend every day like a newlywed couple, they now must face the reality of their aging romance. My Love, Don't Cross that River captures the fleeting moments of their twilight days.
Learn More
Card image
The Passing On
Three professions ushered former slaves from poverty to the American dream: preacher, teacher, and undertaker. Now, renowned embalmer James Bryant puts his faith in a new generation to continue the legacy of Black funeral homes in San Antonio, TX.
Learn More
Card image
To Dust
Shmuel, a Hasidic cantor in upstate New York, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace, while secretly obsessing over how her body will decay.
Learn More
Card image
Two Gods
The story of Hanif, a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in Newark who take two young men-Naz and Furquan-under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.
Learn More
Card image
Varanasi - Facing death without fear | DW Documentary
Mayer visits a very special hospice for the dying in Varanasi. Here, he encounters a different, more relaxed approach to death. He meets extraordinary people.
Learn More

Light-Hearted

Card image
Death At A Funeral
A hilarious day in the life of an American family come together to put a beloved husband and father to rest. As mourners gather at the family home, shocking revelations, festering resentments, ugly threats, blackmail and a misdirected corpse unleash lethal and riotous mayhem.
Learn More
Card image
Funny People
A cantankerous movie star rediscovers stand-up comedy — and the benefits of meaningful relationships — after he gets diagnosed with a fatal illness.
Learn More
Card image
Harold and Maude
Young, rich, and obsessed with death, Harold finds himself changed forever when he meets lively septuagenarian Maude at a funeral.
Learn More
Card image
Steel Magnolias
Steel Magnolias is a story about the bond between a group of women in a small-town Louisiana beauty salon as they navigate life's triumphs, tragedies, and the challenges of friendship and family.
Learn More
Card image
This Is Where I Leave You
When their father passes away, four grown siblings, bruised and banged up by their respective adult lives, are forced to return to their childhood home and live under the same roof together for a week, along with their over-sharing mother and an assortment of spouses, exes and might-have-beens.
Learn More

Young Adult

Card image
Big Fish
Big Fish is a 2003 fantasy drama film directed by Tim Burton that tells the story of a son trying to separate fact from fiction in the life of his dying, tall-tale-telling father.
Learn More
Card image
Charlie St. Cloud
After Charlie survives a car crash that kills his younger brother, he is given the gift of seeing the spirits of his brother and others who he has lost, and must use his powers to save the woman he loves from impending disaster.
Learn More
Card image
Dayveon
In the wake of his older brother's death, 13-year-old Dayveon spends the sweltering summer days roaming his rural Arkansas town.
Learn More
Card image
The Fault in Our Stars
A dying teenage girl unexpectedly falls for a fellow cancer survivor in this moving adaptation of the bestselling novel.
Learn More
Card image
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio is a beautiful and unique interpretation of a classic that explores death and grief in ways that are often emotional and heartbreaking whilst still delivering a fun adventure.
Learn More
Card image
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
Two teens live the same day repeatedly, enabling them to create a map of things to remember.
Learn More

Pets

Card image
Hachi: A Dog's Tale
Professor Wilson discovers a lost Akita puppy on his way home. Despite objections from his wife, Hachi endears himself to the family and grows to be Parker's loyal companion. As their bond grows deeper, a beautiful relationship unfolds.
Learn More

Copyright © 2026 Center for Death Education, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All Rights Reserved