Heaven

The directorial debut of Diane Keaton, the eccentric 1987 documentary Heaven is a free-flowing examination of the images people hold of the afterlife. Rather than taking a historical or narrative approach, the film is built out of numerous segments, each of which centers around a single question: from the general "Are You Afraid to Die?" and "What is Heaven?" to more provocative queries such as "What is God Like?" and "Is There Sex in Heaven?". The bulk of the film consists of expressively lit interviews, about these questions, with a wide variety of individuals. The film searches out people of extremely different backgrounds, from elderly men and women to punkish teenagers. Religious beliefs represented range from intensely fundamentalist Christian preachers to New Age practitioners with a far more non-traditional image of heaven. These interviews are broken up by montages of stock footage, which present images of death and heaven as represented in classic (and not-so-classic) cinema and television.