The Oracle (1993)

Overview

Set in Port Townsend, San Francisco, and the "bardo terrains of the soul realm," this promising 70-minute debut feature (shot in Hi-8 and 3/4" video and Super 8 film) is a visionary exploration of an elderly bedridden man's interior journey toward death and beyond. It's also a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartrending portrayal of his family's changing perceptions of the process of death. It follows the final day in the life of an elderly patriarch who has lapsed into an intermittent coma. As he dies, his son returns home to visit the family, where he unexpectedly participates in an ancient ritual of ancestral origins.