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Even people who are comfortable discussing death – including the inevitable prospect of their own – might understand little about how it actually tends to unfold unless they’ve experienced it firsthand alongside a loved one. In this brief animation, author Kathryn Mannix, who worked as a palliative care physician for 20 years, offers viewers a sensitive, honest and practical guide to how death tends to progress under normal, or perhaps ideal, circumstances. Pairing her narration with gentle, flowing animations, the UK filmmaker Emily Downe’s short makes a powerful case that there’s deep value in discussing and understanding death well before it touches us.
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes