The year is 2732. The body of Nasar Ghafoor, a man who lived in the 21st century, thaws after a long, long, long cryonic sleep. Medical personnel, leveraging technology unknown in our present times, make the necessary preparations to bring him back to life.
Hey, it could happen. You never know.
Ghafoor, the focus of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Eternal Father, has committed to having his body stored in an indefinite freeze after he passes, whenever that may occur.
“Who wants to die? If there was a way of cheating death, yeah, why not?” Ghafoor says of his reasoning. “I thought, well, go for it. I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Ghafoor defies the stereotypical image of someone keen on being reanimated. He’s not a “visionary billionaire” type, but an installation engineer for Virgin Media (coincidentally, a company founded by one of those visionary billionaires, Richard Branson). Ghafoor’s in his late 50s and lives modestly in a town outside Manchester, England with his wife, who is a generation younger than him, and their young kids.
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“I did remarry at a later age,” he notes. “It always occurred to me, I want to be here longer, I want to be here longer. I was looking for ways of extending our life, healthy life, and this is how I accidentally stumbled across cryonics… If there’s a way to extend it in the future after death, and maybe my family can follow as well if they choose to do this.”
Director Ömer Sami sees a universal element to the story, “which is we’re all going to deal with death at some point in our life and how do we deal with that? And I thought that by exploring it through Nasar’s family, they’re so relatable… The considerations that Nasar has about wanting to watch his children grow up, I thought whether or not you agree or disagree with cryonics, that’s something a lot of people can relate to in some way.”
The filmmaker met his protagonist at a cryonics informational meeting, of the kind held periodically in the U.K.
“I really struggled to find someone that lit up my imagination. But at the very last meeting, I was lucky enough to meet Nasar who had brought his family along and they were doing these kinds of demonstrations, some of which you see in the film, and I could see Nasar’s kids’ faces were lit up… and [I saw] a lovely warmth between them. So, I knew immediately that I wanted to spend time with them and to understand how they as a family understood Nasar’s choice.”
In the film, Ghafoor sits in a wood-paneled living room with his kids, discussing the preservation plan.
“If the average [lifespan] is 70 for males, I’ve only got 10 years? That’s what comes through my mind. I want to see you get married, see your children,” he tells his son and daughters. One daughter notes, “I mean, it’s the cycle of humans. It’s what they go through.” Nasar laughs, “I’m gonna break the cycle.”
In voiceover at the beginning of Eternal Father, Ghafoor describes the ins and outs of cryonic preservation. A first step would be for a doctor to declare him legally dead. “I’ll be placed in an ice bath and my blood will be drained, and replaced with a kind of antifreeze,” he notes calmly. “I’ll be transferred to the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees C.”
The cost of cryonic preservation ranges considerably – from roughly $20,000 to $200,000. “There’s the ‘Apple and Microsoft’ version and it is very sleek,” Sami comments, “and you pay for this whole package where they have a fund that guarantees if their business goes bankrupt, they ensure you will be kept frozen somewhere else. Whereas the cheaper option, they don’t have that guarantee. And then you have to pay for your own shipping [of your body] to get yourself over there.”
Ghafoor obtained a life insurance policy to cover the costs of cryonic preservation.
“If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” he tells Deadline. “Life insurance is life insurance. That’s the way I see it. So, if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”
Sami adds, “Your death has to be under the right circumstances. If you died in a car crash, say, and your body was torn apart, then you wouldn’t be able to be frozen anyway. The life insurance would pay out to your family and the cryonics facility would get none of that money. But assuming you are frozen and sent [to the cryonics lab] under the right conditions, the contract they have is kind of, they’re just promising to store you. They’re not promising to revive you. They’re saying, ‘Our job is to store you here until the science evolves enough.’ And then it’s kind of unknown as to who’s going to do what, who’s responsibility it’s going to be [to revive you].”
Eternal Father is streaming (for free) on The New Yorker website and the magazine’s YouTube channel. It’s one of 15 short documentaries to make the Oscar shortlist.
“I couldn’t possibly have imagined it would have happened when I made the film,” Sami says of the shortlist distinction. “My initial goal was to have it premiere IDFA, and that was fulfilled. And since then, it’s just been a kind of riding this wild dream wave. So yeah, it’s amazing and a wonderful surprise.”
Ghafoor shared his assessment of the film with us.
“When Ömer first showed our family the finished documentary, we were in tears, me and my family. It was really, really incredible,” he says. “It was better than what I expected, what I was thinking. The only downside, it just felt too short. I wish it was a bit longer.”
Ah, that Nasar. Always wanting to extend things.
The post Frozen In Time: British Man Signs Up For Cryonic Preservation In Oscar-Contending Documentary ‘Eternal Father’ appeared first on Deadline.
