Attending the funeral of one of his friends, Satoru sees a woman who looks exactly like his deceased wife Shizuko. The film mixes reality with death and parting, when the ghost of the deceased wife chases her husband.
A jaded Lower East Side couple have become bored of straight sex, in a bid to spice things up, they decide to imitate some rough sex scenes as seen on TV.
During the general elections of 1994, Tunin, a mechanic with a firm belief in communism fears that his party is about to lose, so he journeys to a northern village to stir up trouble.
Set on May 18, 1993—the day on which Denmark voted to join the European Union, just a few months after they'd voted not to do so—the film follows eight or so disparate Danes (an escaped mental patient, a newly-famous singer, a business executive, and their assorted families and cohorts) as they unwittingly alter one another's lives, for better and for worse.
Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf claims to have never seen a movie before making his first film. Doubtful as it sounds, this boast matches perfectly with the controversial artist's personae.
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.