"Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed."

A compelling and revealing exploration of one person's psyche in crisis.... The film is a screen diary of a man in his early 30s afflicted with a life-threatening disease, a man confronting his own mortality.

Elder depicts forms of life that have grown increasingly out of touch with the body, and attempts to elicit and experience of the delight that results from reconnecting with our natural being

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World belongs to a 35-hour film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Toronto-based Bruce Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of religious texts intended to help preserve the spirit of the departed in the afterlife — but in Elder’s reading, that comforting idea of continuity takes on a rather darker cast. Lamentations is comprised of a complex audio and visual patchwork: a philosophical meditation superimposed as text throughout the film; vignettes featuring a comical but disturbing Franz Liszt, a debate between Isaac Newton and George Berkeley, an angry, deranged man in an alley, and an arrogant psychiatrist; and a final search for salvation in the forests of British Columbia, the American Southwest, and Mexico’s Yucatan.