In 1996, Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, one of Japan's most infamous Pinku Eiga filmmaker/ death photographers, ventured into the Rue Morgue neighbourhood of Bogota, which is one of the most dangerous areas of the Colombia's capital. The film is an extremely disturbing look into the poverty-stricken side of the world and its practices in death.
This isn't gore porn or sleaze cinema but an intriguing portrait of a man at work who has been tending the dead for over 50 years. It is a shockumentary, but also an interesting sociological study regarding the acceptance of death.
Tsurisaki Kiyotaka spent 3 years following Orozco, a former police officer who now is an embalmer, with over 50 years of experience as a mortician who passed away during the production of the film. Sadly, the man who embalmed than 50,000 bodies in his entire life, was not embalmed. Nor does his grave exist.
'Orozco the Embalmer' is one of the most unrelentingly grim works in existence, the haunting evocation of the rigor mortis and its cadaverous expression ever made on film. This is an essential watch for the fans of Mondo films, Aroma Planning/ Baroque Studio and Shockumentaries, also those who watched Susumu Saegusa films, Der Weg nach Eden (1995) by Robert-Adrian Pejo, John Alan Schwartz's Faces of Death (1978), A Certain Kind of Death (2003) and Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971) will appreciate this unsettling piece of work.
