Four Stories About Death: A Sage, a Monk, a Ballerina and a Tyrant

This meditation on the subject that has never gone out of fashion is derived from the factual material and includes the last moments of Socrates, based on Plato’s Crito and Pheado dialogues, a Buddhist Monk, based on the reported stories of the Chinese Zen monks, a Ballerina in a Nazi death camp, documented in the work of a German psychiatrist and, finally, the death of Joseph Stalin, based on the recollections by his personal guards. Despite the subject matter the script does not contain elements usually associated with death. It is not approached as something wrong or morbid. It sees death as a reflection of one’s life.