Zen and the Art of Dying
by Debra Beattie,
Associate Producer of the feature-length documentary Zen and the Art of Dying, by Broderick Fox.
Zenith Virago is an activist and educator who for over 20 years has been returning the coastal region of Byron Bay, Australia to a more communal, celebratory, and creative engagement with death and dying. From her origins as a young mother in the UK, to her present day identity as a lesbian, feminist, and self-described deathwalker in the idyllic seaside town of Byron Bay, Zenith’s personal and professional experiences quietly challenge our core assumptions about life and dissolve our taboos around death.
The most sought-after marriage celebrant in an increasingly commercialized wedding destination town, Zenith is also co-founder of the Australian Natural Death Care Centre, an organization that provides end-of-life decision planning and DIY funeral alternatives to residents of Australia’s North Coast. Whether marrying or burying, Zenith’s mission remains clear: to help people reclaim their most personal, profound, and vulnerable life moments from commercial forces, government bureaucracy, and cultural taboos. For Zenith, deathwalking is nothing new; it is a process of reclaiming and re-imagining community and family-oriented death care traditions that were progressively lost to Western culture over the last century.
Filmmaker Broderick Fox and executive producer Lee Biolos embedded with Virago for five weeks of filming in Byron Shire to create Zen & the Art of Dying, a feature-length documentary portrait of Zenith and her pioneering work. The project started when Broderick and I were at the Byron Bay International film festival in 2012 where his autobiographical film The Skin I’m In was screening. He met Zenith Virago then and decided to film her in her amazing work as a palliative care worker helping people to die in peace.
Zenith’s example, and the willingness of Byron Shire’s citizens to join her cause, invite each of us to reexamine and reclaim a more active role in how we live, love, and die.
About the Author
Debra Beattie
Associate Producer Debra Beattie
Debra is an Australian filmmaker and professor at Griffith University in Queensland. Beattie has been producing and directing documentaries on Australian culture and indigenous groups for over twenty years and has also served as the associate producer on projects such as the acclaimed Fairweather Man (2009) a television documentary on artist Ian Fairweather. Beattie is an innovative creator and scholar of new media documentary and social engagement. She directed The Wrong Crowd, a pioneering web-based documentary project produced for the ABC and has developed design solutions and best practices for online counseling of youth.
