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When it first made headlines in 2010, Jason Leach’s UK-based company And Vinyly – which presses the ashes of the deceased into vinyl records for loved ones wishing to hold onto their memory – appeared to be something of a macabre novelty. But there might be more to preserving the departed (quite literally) on records than first meets the eye – and ear. Hearing Madge explores how Leach’s venture was given new meaning when he was approached by a man looking to save his mother’s recollections that he had recorded shortly before her death. Surprisingly touching, Andrea Lewis’s short documentary is both a profile of an unusual business and a thought-provoking contemplation of the ways we chose to remember the dead.
Director: Andrea Lewis
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
The police camp where tween girls enter a sisterhood of law and order
28 minutes
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Astronomy
The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky
5 minutes
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Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes