尸体防腐员欧罗柯 (2001)

Documented between 1996 and 2001 by pinku eiga director/professional corpse photographer Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, Orozco The Embalmer is a unflinching ninety minute documentary that explores the work of former police inspector turned embalmer, Froilan Orozco. A middle aged man suffering from some health problems, Orozco claims to have embalmed thousands of bodies, an average of five per day going under his knife. Based in El Cartucho, a small part of Bogota, Columbia which is rampant with violent crime and drug abuse, Orozco works at a small, run down funeral home right across the road from the local medical center, he’s never in need of work and seems to have a constant stream of corpses to deal with.There isn’t really a plot to discuss, the film is a simple collection of vignettes showing Orozco at work with some clips spliced in that show what the neighborhood he works in is like. Tsurisaki’s camera, unsurprisingly, leaves nothing to the imagination and none of what you see in this documentary is faked. Corpses are cut open quickly, their innards removed, their torsos cleaned out and chemically treated. At one point a face is pulled back from the skull and the cranial cavity stuffed with paper to help slow down decomposition. The skin that makes up the face is then pulled back into place, the body is literally tossed into a coffin, make up then applied as some sort of last touch.As Orozco goes about his work it’s easy to see how jaded he is. A man literally surrounded by death, he talks openly and nonchalantly to anyone who comes into his embalming room, even going so far as to ask one girl out. This is very much just a job to him, he doesn’t really seem to feel much for his victims, though at one point when the corpse of an infant is brought in you can’t really tell if he’s referring to the deceased child as ‘a little shit’ because of disdain or out of duress. Orozco goes about his business with almost ruthless efficiency, cutting and cleaning as quickly as a butcher