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Marw gyda Kris

Kristoffer Hughes travels the world in search of different, bizarre - and maybe better - ways of dealing with death. As a druid and a well known performing drag queen - Kris is both a very spiritual and funny soul. He’s also a professional mortician who’s worked in some of the main mortuaries around Britain, doing post mortems and preparing bodies for funerals and viewings. In this four part documentary - Marw gyda Kris (Dying with Kris) - he embarks on a journey from Wales to Mexico, India, the USA and Indonesia to see how different and indigenous cultures deal with death. Always taking Wales and his experience of death with him, Kris feels that as Celts we have a rich and deep tradition of dealing with death in unique and meaningful ways. Some of the customs experienced on this amazing journey will chime with his knowledge of how we as Celts used to deal with death in the past. Kris feels that death is by now taboo in much of Wales and Britain - and thinks that we are bad at discussing and dealing with death. He wants to challenge and maybe change this. Also, having just reached the same age as his father was when he died - Kris is also thinking more about his own death. When his father died, no one wanted to talk about it, except for him. He also prepared his sister’s body when she died at 22 years old. On this journey he will meet cultures and people that are also beautifully close to their dead - as the celts once were - and as he wishes we were again. Every episode begins in Wales - we see Kris as a druid and drag-queen, his “coping mechanisms” for working with the dead for so many years. We see him as a celebrant leading a funeral service and we get to understand why cremation is so popular in Wales and the west. In the first episode he travels to Mexico. He experiences the amazing Dia de los Muertos festival (Day of the Dead), and learns about the death saint cult Santa Muerte. He’s moved to tears when watching a family clean the bones of their loved ones, and spends a night at a cemetery on Janitzio island where families welcome the dead back on the night of the dead. For the second episode he’s in India’s holiest city, Varanasi. After going behind the scenes at a crematorium in north Wales he wants to experience open-air cremation on the banks of the Ganges. He also visits a death hotel and meets the extreme figure of the Aghori Baba, who eats human flesh… apparently. The third takes him to America. He revisits the coroner’s office in Los Angeles where he had an internship in the 90s - dealing with murdered victims daily. He also looks at the world of expensive caskets, visits Hollywood Forever Cemetery and learns about our obsession with death on screen. In Seattle, his mind is blown as he learns about body composting, a very new - but also natural - process where bodies of the deceased are turned into compost which can be used to re-grow life on earth. The fourth, and the last, takes him to Indonesia. On Java, in the capital Jakarta he manages to experience a Muslim funeral for the first time ever. He witnesses how the body is buried within hours of death - in the most natural and beautiful way. Kris then embarks on a journey to Sulawesi Island and deep into the jungle of Tana Toraja to meet families who live with their dead for years before burying them. He then joins a Torajan community who ‘resurrect’ their bodies from their tombs every few years or so. To clean and refresh them, caring and remembering their dead by taking them out of their graves. This is a unique and emotional journey - from the families that keep the body for years at home to those that throw a party every year for the spirits. From the ancient practice of open air cremation to the new science of body composting that’s gaining pace... Marw gyda Kris (Dying with Kris) is a personal journey into the world of death. An adventure to the ends of our being.