In a short film, Kim Acquaviva and her wife, Kathy Brandt, who died of cancer in 2019, document their family’s last days together through frank and frequent social-media posts. Watch here.
“In a culture where we don’t share almost anything around illness and death,” Kim Acquaviva says in “Documenting Death,” “the only way to counter that is for some people to share a little bit more than is probably appropriate.”
That the good things in life may be savored even by the dying is, in American culture, a quietly subversive idea. It is also one of the themes of “Documenting Death,” a new, short documentary directed and produced bySara Joe Wolansky. The film tells the story of Kim Acquaviva and her wife, Kathy Brandt, who died of cancer in 2019, at the age of fifty-four.