In JJ Gerber’s The Life We Leave, Micah Truman pursues a new way to deal with what happens when we die: taking advantage of the legalization of human composting to construct a terramation facility. What may be terrifying or unpleasant to some is unpacked in a rich and rewarding manner in this affecting documentary that shows how a select group of people are making the choice to have their bodies literally return to the earth and give a different kind of gift to those they’ve left behind.
Awards Buzz spoke with Gerber about how he first discovered this subject after a personal loss of his own:
“I came to this project as a whole from a place of grief. My mom died in 2018, and I had a very transactional interaction with the funeral industry for deathcare. It was like, here’s a box of ash, would you like to buy a keychain? It just felt kind of icky to me, so I was coming to it from that perspective, thinking that that’s how the funeral industry was, and that it’s this place that is designed to, I don’t want to say take advantage of your vulnerabilities, but it’s a capitalist thing that has been created to get money from you while you’re grieving and you’re not really thinking straight and like, sure, I’ll buy a dinner plate with my mom’s face on it, why not? That’s exactly what I need right now! Maybe for some people that’s helpful. For me, that wasn’t necessarily the prospect I needed to help me with my grieving. So when I first heard about human composting, I thought that perhaps it was another venture down that same kind of path, and I had more questions about the alternative deathcare industry that I got clued into as a result of looking into human composting. I thought that that was cool, looking into what death doulas do and looking at how there was this undercurrent of people having the same realizations that I was. So this film started almost topically in being like, ‘Well, let’s look at the people that are our changemakers in here.’”
Watch the video above to hear about what Gerber learned about this world, what questions he still has, and how people have responded so far to this subject.
The Life We Leave makes its world premiere in the Documentary Feature Competition at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
