
The Potter’s Field
Homeless and unidentified people who die without family or money often end up in a potter's field, a mass burial ground with no names attached, and this film follows the volunteers trying to change that. In Louisville, Kentucky, a group founded in 2006 draws students and teachers from seven area high schools who show up, often as the only mourners, to give short funeral services for indigent dead they never met. Outside Chicago, the film shows a starker version of the same problem: a U-Haul truck unloading identical plain coffins into a communal trench, part of roughly 250 indigent burials the county handles each year, each marked only by a guessed date of death. A deputy coroner explains that even when he tracks down relatives, about eighty percent decline to claim the body or attend a service. Interviews on the street reveal how little most people know or think about any of this. The film sits with the volunteers' small, repeated act of showing up, and with the harder question of what a funeral is actually for when no one else comes.