A free film from the argos collection on your screen every month. During the first half of 2026, argos TV unfolds alongside our exhibition Becoming Ancestors.

In this work, the artist documents his stay in Cameroon, where participation in funeral rites gradually unsettles Western distinctions between life and death. As the film follows celebrations in which the dead remain present, it opens a space where ancestrality is not a distant past but a lived continuum.

Matthew Lancit, La Saison des funérailles (2011)
Canada, 87 min
English and French spoken, English and French subtitles

A lost and lonely foreigner follows a tailor, an interpreter, a filmmaker, and a retired ethnology professor to extravagant funerals and death celebrations in the heart of Cameroon. He soon understands that the locals don’t differentiate between the worlds of the living and the dead. The dead are not dead, a belief that slipped through the cracks of colonisation, Christianisation, and cultural globalisation. Village after village, relationships develop. The foreigner befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors.