User Reviews

This is the best documentary I've seen.* Thomas Haemmerli is notified by the police of his mother's death. She had been dead in her kitchen for some time before her body was discovered, and she was, it turns out, an obsessive hoarder -- her apartment is filled to overflowing (she has storage lockers) with the accretia of her life. Thomas and his brother, Erik, take a month to clear out all the garbage.

The dysfunction of this family is world class, and I hope the month of sifting through their mother's life and making this documentary worked as a catharsis for the two brothers. And that is the reason this documentary is the best I've seen.

One of the ways of distinguishing art from craft is that the artist puts all of himself into each work of art, fully. Each painting, for example, is a painting _of_ the artist as well as _by_ the artist. And this film is not a home movie of two guys cleaning out an apartment. It is a moving piece of Haemmerli himself.

"Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse" was filmed by Ariane Kessissoglou and edited brilliantly by Daniel Cherbuin; original music was done by Alexander Faehndrich. All three of these people were also fully involved in the documentary.

"Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse" is titled darkly after what was in their mother's apartment: Seven dumpsters worth of trash and her decomposed corpse. That the trash come first in the title is a hint of what is to come over the next hour and a half. The corpse was an avid amateur filmmaker in her youth, and we get to see Super 8 home movies of the family's idyllic life in Zurich, the south of France, skiing in the Alps, the vacation home in Greece. But we also get filled in on the divorce, the anger, the sex lives, the adultery, the rage, the lawsuits, the hate, the spite. And we see through the film how their parents' lives (and the lives of their grandparents, it turns out) have affected the two sons even into their forties.

The editing of the two men throwing their mother's life into a dumpster and breaking down boxes and baskets and their mother's life is brilliant and moving. Film schools could teach a course on the editing done here, with the flat, affectless voice-over of Thomas reading from the papers of the divorce lawsuit as the petitioner and respondent recite a laundry list of wrongdoing and suffering, as we watch the two offspring sledgehammer and stomp the remains of their mother's life into submission and have it all hauled off by huge trucks in the seven dumpsters, taken away and out of sight, disappearing into the giant maw of god knows what efficient Swiss means of disposal has been engineered for ridding ourselves of a life's worth of things.

Pay attention during the film. Much of what goes around comes around again. And the "Ende" is not in fact the end. Wait and watch through the credits. This is a great piece of art. There is much humor, and there is much feeling. Both are understated, so careful attention is well-rewarded.

*Okay, so is "Ryan." They tie for first place. There is no second place. Nor third. No other documentary is even in the running.

In European culture death is a kind of taboo. Although it's a inevitable part of life, and everybody who is born will die, with no exception. This documentary is based upon the experiences of the Hämmerli brothers, when they were confronted with the death of their mother and everything around this "event". On his 40th birthday Thomas Hämmerli's mother dies in her apartment. The police finds her body, that was situated on the floor, which had a floor heating. Normally people are only confronted with situations like this, if they work for first aid medical services, fire department or police. The film starts with Hämmerli, in this situation coming to his mother's apartment. His mother was what is called messie today. In this kind of shock, confronted with the remains of his mother, he took his camera to get some distance to the situation. He tells about the hardships of finding a cleaning company to clean the floor, where the corpse was. After that kind of real shocking start of the movie, his brother arrives to help him throw away everything, his mother collected for years. This part of the movie is not political correct, and has a lot of very dark humor. This movie is dealing with death and the things the family members have to deal with. He is showing all the things that come up, when you are confronted with situations like this (it took them one month to clean the apartment). Many people will find this movie impious, I think it's very honest. And it's very funny sometimes.

"Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche" or "Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse" is a Swiss production in the German language. This one came out back in 2007, so it has its 10th anniversary this year. The writer and director is Thomas Haemmerli and here he depicts what happens after his mother died. I think the idea of us having to be ready for the death of our parents and consequently cleaning out their flat (somehow their existence) is one that many are scared of and rightfully so. The filmmaker here tells us about this very particular event in his own life. We find out a bit about how she danced with Kofi Annan once or how a famous athlete as a child was in the protagonists' lives, but honestly, I never felt that this film is really memorable for any reason to anybody outside the family. It is a personal movie, but there is zero relevance for strangers in my opinion. So I was a bit glad it only runs for 80 minutes. Besides that, I wonder what the mother would have said about the film or if she had even agreed on making it because it is pretty personal and I am sure she would not want her untidiness become known to the world. Anyway, it is all really just speculation. I myself do not really see any foundation in this film where I would say that this is a subject deserving of a movie that would be shown anywhere else outside family reunions perhaps. I give it a thumbs-down. Not recommended.