"306 Hollywood" poster (Image provided)

In the summer of 2017 my grandmother died, and my family had to clear out her house before putting it on the market. My father and his siblings divvied up the antique bureaus and work desks. My sister jokingly donned grandma’s old lady pants — wide-legged, loose-fitting white pajamas easily capable of slipping on and off. My aunts Eileen and Maureen organized family photos from decades ago, the kind where sepia wasn’t an added filter but a natural product of developing film. I wound up taking only an audio cassette player, a set of silverware and cast iron skillet.

This story isn’t special to just me. Everybody goes through this. When a family member dies, the question becomes, “What do we do with their stuff?” Elan and Jonathan Bogarin answered that with, “Make a film, of course.”

“306 Hollywood” follows the brother-sister pair as they clear out their grandmother’s home and catalog the remnants of her life. They take her small New Jersey house and convert it into an archaeological dig.

Classifying the movie is a little tough. It’s not quite a documentary and not a film either. Candid interviews with grandma in the 10 years before her death are interspersed with magical choreographed dance scenes and montages of mundane objects such as hats, dresses, tools, and radios organized in the vein of a Wes Anderson film post “Rushmore.”

“306 Hollywood” crescendos at multiple instances, but the climax comes in a five-minute non-stop video of grandma, who was a seamstress, taking off her shirt and pants trying to fit into an old dress. The site of grandma’s large panties, fat rolls and liver spots are uncomfortable yet hilarious.

At one point, the movie walks that line between doc and film even further, when Elan and Jonathan find audio recordings of their family’s conversations. The audio is real, but then the two use a giant telescope to essentially time travel and watch those conversations, which are of course played out by actors.

Is this a good direction for film and documentary — a blended concoction of both? Maybe.

The vibrancy and color in “306 Hollywood” mesmerizes. The camera work is that good. The dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” and the interstellar travel in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” thrill audiences, and somehow Elan and Jonathan are able to capture a similar cinematic astonishment when they point their camera at a leftover box of Premium Saltines sitting in the sun.

For a film centered around the death of a loved one, “306 Hollywood” is bursting with life.