“Measures for a Funeral’s” Sonic Grief

Sofia Bohdanowicz’s feature film Measures for a Funeral arrives like a dirge played backwards. Not as a resurrection, mind you, but as a slow archaeological and archival excavation. This is a film about researching the dead that becomes, through some cruel alchemy of form and grief, an autopsy of research itself. Bohdanowicz has expanded her 2018 short into something that feels lengthened and deepened—a hole dug further into frozen Canadian ground.

The story begins with Audrey Benac (Dreagh Campbell), a graduate student consumed by the life of the real-life classical violinist, Kathleen Parlow. Born in 1890, Kathleen Parlow rose to become one of the early twentieth century’s most accomplished violinists, though her name has largely faded from public memory. Her extraordinary skill earned her recognition as a virtuoso among her contemporaries, with admirers dubbing her “The lady of the golden bow.”

Audrey is trying to finish her thesis on Parlow, but has a dying mother at home. Regardless, she follows Parlow’s life, strapped with a violin on her back, leading her to England and Oslo. The score by Olivier Alary, who has worked with artists like Björk and Cat Power, establishes a moody, ominous tone immediately, using extensive repetitive notes that heighten tension and summon a horror atmosphere lurking beneath the drama. What makes the music so devastating is its patience. The film features an almost thriller-like buzz of static frequently on the soundtrack, creating an aural texture that suggests archival decay, the sound of history itself degrading on wax cylinders and magnetic tape.

The score immerses viewers in the world of classical music, but it never romanticizes it. Instead, it exposes classical music’s capacity for haunting—how sound persists differently than material objects, how recordings become containers for the dead, how music can be both preservation and curse. Audrey and the film itself understand something profound about archival work: that listening to recordings of the deceased is a form of séance.

Cinéma du Musée | Sunday, November 23 | 2 PM Mesures Funèbres – presented in collaboration with the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal
This special event includes a screening of the film and a Q&A with members of the production team (producer Andreas Mendritzki, composer Olivier Alary and archival lead Hourman Behzadi) and members of the OM (CEO Fabienne Voisin and Artistic Programming Director Mathilde Lemieux), moderated by Head of Short Films & Programmer of Feature Films at FNC Émilie Poirier.