One in a string of memorable moments in filmmaker Christine Turner’s moving documentary, “Homegoings,” refuses to leave my mind’s eye: Isaiah Owens, owner of Owens Funeral Home on Lenox Ave. in Harlem, crawling around in the dirt.
Owens, 62, is the subject and star of “Homegoings,” a film that uses his 57-year-long career and life as a funeral director to examine African-American death rituals.
“We’re bringing death out of the closet,” Owens said. “Everybody knows it’s there, but nobody wants to talk about it.”
In the aforementioned scene, Owens is on his hands and knees hovering over a make-believe church he has scratched in the dirt. This is no simple church: Nails and clothes hangers snapped in half serve as people; pink corncobs as cars, a long blackened corncob as a hearse.
Owens has cut a door into the top half of an aluminum soda can, then lined the inside of the can with tissue paper. He gently lays a wooden matchstick onto the tissues, then closes the makeshift lid — the perfect match-stick coffin.
Then Owens buries it, in a perfectly shaped little hole, just as he did when he was 5 years old.
Yes, Owens played at burying people until he could do the real thing.
But what you notice in the play burial is the serenity on Owens’ face, the same look you see elsewhere in the film when he is officiating at an actual funeral, or when he’s preparing a newly arrived body in the mortuary’s prep room.
For Owens, a funeral, even for a dead matchstick, demands decorum and respect.
With funeral homes, or parlors, in Harlem and in his native Branchville, S.C., Owens estimates he has prepared some 10,000 corpses for burial — including his father, a sister and close to a dozen other relatives — over the course of his career.
“My business is pretty much word-of-mouth and reputation,” Owens said. “I don’t do a lot of advertising. People do the advertising for me. People see my work and just know, when the time comes, this is where they want to be.
“In Harlem that’s the joke,” said Owens, known to neighbors as “Fix-Em” for his ability to repair bodies ravaged by disease, mishap or violence. “They say ‘Child, she looked better now than she did when she was living.'”
“Homegoings” will debut on 8 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Museum of Modern Art’s “Documentary Fortnight 2013 showcase, during which MoMA will screen 22 films created in PBS Television’s POV (Point of View) series.
“Homegoings” will have its POV debut later this year. A date has not been set.
Turner, 30, is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. The child of a Chinese-American mother and African-American father, she said she became intrigued by death rituals after both grandmothers died within two weeks of each other.
Years later, in 2008, she saw a newspaper article about Owens’ skill at beautifying the dead.
“I had been to one open-casket funeral in my life, my father’s mother, Mildred Turner,” Turner said. “I remember seeing her and thinking that she looked really different; she didn’t look like my grandmother. As a 13-year-old kid, it just made an impression on me.
“I was intrigued by the idea of, Who is this man who has this reputation.”
She called, and the two clicked. They began filming in 2009.
“He said this is his calling,” Turner said. “There was a uniqueness about him. When he told me about holding make-believe funerals as a kid, I could not help but think this is somebody who has been doing this his whole life.
“The other thing that appealed to me about Mr. Owens is that he is very much a self-made man,” she added. “He grew up in rural South Carolina, the son of a cotton sharecropper, and he’s built this incredible life.
“It is very much in the tradition of many African-Americans who have risen to the middle class through this particular profession.”
Turner’s film is shot in respectful intimacy; you see Owens dressing corpses and putting mascara around dead eyes, but only hints of the messy parts of the embalming process.
Owens said “Homegoings” is “a perfect film,” in part because it tells the story of an admittedly weird kid — his parents worried about Owens’ obsession with the dead, and on several occasions an older brother tried to beat it out of him — who escaped the life of a South Carolina sharecropper to make good.
“The most important part of the documentary for me is me being in the cotton field,” Owens said. “I don’t want people to get this story and all of a sudden think it is a Harlem story. It is a cotton story.
“Home for me is the cotton field. This became a Harlem story, but my story started in the cotton field.”
You can see the “Homegoings” trailer here; https://vimeo.com/53607653
For MoMA screening tickets, see the website, www.moma.org/visit/plan/#filmticketing.
crichardson@nydailynews.com
