Tidying up after a passing

It was a phone call that got Sica started. About 10 days before last year's Tomb Sweeping Day on April 5, Sica was visiting a graveyard in Shanghai when documentary director Zhou Yijun called her.

"She saw the photos I shared on my social media platform and she wondered why I was in a graveyard," recalls Sica, whose real name is Wang Zeyu and is a full-time home organizer and "decluttering "consultant.

Then Sica told Zhou about her ideas of helping people who lost beloved family members on how to organize their homes, and especially how to handle the items that once belonged to the deceased. Zhou initiated the idea of shooting a documentary about it and they wanted to highlight people in Wuhan, Hubei province, who lost family members during the coronavirus pandemic.

But it was not easy.

"We contacted nearly 100 families and most turned us down," recalls Sica. "Death seems to be a big taboo topic among Chinese people. It was also very hard to persuade them to let a stranger work in their homes to help deal with things that belonged to the deceased. Many people just want to burn or throw away those things."

Luckily, they had three families join the project. Throughout last year, Sica and the documentary team traveled to Wuhan several times to visit those families. A 30-minute version of the documentary was recently released online.

"It was not just a process of decluttering and organizing their homes after the death of loved ones. When we worked together and went through the things the dead family members used, the families dealt with them as a way to cope with their loss and reconnect with those deceased family members through those things," says Sica.