As it follows more than two years of Civil War strife, from early 1861 through 1863, the film sustains a tone of grave, high-minded seriousness.
The geology, as Brian Hall wrote in "The Impossible Country," is "a mass-murderer's dream come true, a mighty necropolis of empty mass graves, high and dry, waiting to be filled".
It is a short drive to his grave, piled high with hundreds of flowers left by visitors.
By visiting Berger's grave, his high school and a National Park Service memorial in his name, I hope to gain greater insight into this lone tree: Berger earned M.B.A. and law degrees at Columbia, then moved to Israel and competed on the world stage.
Speaking from beyond the grave, a high school senior named Cheryl opens the book: she was murdered by student gunmen on the day she learned she was pregnant by a fellow Christian youth group enthusiast named Jason, whom she had secretly married.
Instead of heading to her grandparents' vineyards in Graves after high school, Sanders went to Paris to study marketing, communications, and economics, earning the equivalent of a master's degree at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1991.
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The tribal administrator says they hope to move all the graves to higher ground but don't have the money to do so.
That's also why, for all the grave intensity and high personal stakes of the struggle between the two women in the house, a higher humor arises from the movie, similar to the laughter that Kafka unleashed when reading his own stories aloud.
Next, the AME, an association of retired military personnel, which insisted that "any flicker of secession to be suppressed": those calling for it "will have to respond with all rigour to the grave accusation of high treason under the jurisdiction of military tribunals".
