Maarva Carassi Andor's funeral procession was held in her hometown on the Free Trade sector planet Ferrix following her death in 5 BBY. She was 77 years old. The ceremony was preceded by weeks of tension between the newly established Imperial administration and the locals, owing in part to Prefect Vanis Tigo's harsh policies as well as pre-existing contempt for the previous Morlani government whose military forces, the Pre-Mor Enforcement were responsible for a local man's death during a special operation. Andor's mourners included her fellow Daughters of Ferrix, friend Brasso, and B2 groundmech salvage assist unit droid B2EMO. Her final holorecorded speech was broadcast to the crowd by B2EMO. In it, she urged her fellow Ferrixians to fight the Empire. Andor's funeral immediately erupted into a spontaneous riot when Prefect Tigo attempted to interrupt her speech, causing the participants to attack him and the Imperial Security guarding the event in the formation of the Ferrix resistance movement.
During the Rix Road protest, protesting Ferrixians were killed by Imperial clone troopers.
Maarva Carassi Andor's homeworld was Ferrix, a trade and factory world located in the Morlani system of the Free Trade sector. Formerly a part of the Galactic Republic, it came under Imperial administration sometime after the Proclamation of the New Order. Its citizens valued their independence and actively resisted outside attempts to govern them, a radical faction even openly protesting against the newly established Imperial government during the first deployment of clone troopers to the planet following the Clone Wars in 18 BBY. The protestors faced harsh penalties; Andor's husband, Clem, was publicly executed along with others, and their bodies were left hanging in the Fountain Square for all to see. Although Ferrix was soon handed over to the Preox-Morlana corporate authority, with the Empire radically limiting its contact with the system, Ferrixians remained a tight-knit and vibrant community, creating a strong market of second-hand starship parts reclaimed from the planet's salvage yards where most of the population worked in.
Kravas Drezzer, along with his partner Verlo Skiff, were killed by Cassian Andor on Morlana One.
The relationship between Ferrix and the corporate authority remained relatively passive, with the planet being almost forgotten by the galactic government, the last census being performed in 11 BBY. Few conflicts between the locals and the government ensued, until 5 BBY, when Andor's adopted son, Cassian Jeron Andor, traveled to the system capital Morlana One in an attempt to locate his long lost sister, Kerri. During his stay, he had an altercation with corpos Verlo Skiff and Kravas Drezzer which resulted in their deaths. Pe-Mor Deputy Inspector Syril Karn took over the case despite his superior officer's objections and was quickly able to identify Cassian Andor as the perpetrator of the crime, swiftly deploying a Pre-Mor Security Inspection team led by Sergeant Linus Mosk to arrest him on Ferrix. Unbeknownst to him, Andor was in the process of being hired by rebel Luthen Rael to participate in a mission for him; Rael was heavily armed and able to help Andor engage and kill many Pre-Mor corpos as well as destroy a speeder, ultimately escaping the planet with him. During the skirmish, local Ferrixians assisted the pair in their escape by banging on metallic fixtures along the corpos' path to notify Andor and Rael of their movements as well as removing street signs to confuse them. Maarva Andor was held in her home and refused to cooperate.
Prefect Tigo's policies created tension between the Imperial administration and the locals.
The unprecedented fiasco caught the attention of the ISB Supervisor Blevin who was responsible for the Free Trade system, and responded by placing the Preox-Morlana under permanent Imperial authority. The newly deployed Ferrix garrison consisted of heavily armed stormtrooper and Imperial Army trooper units with a permanent presence on the planet, a sight which angered and confused many locals who were used to a peaceful and unobstructed life. In addition to occupying Hotel Rix, an old city hotel in the central square, to set up a headquarters, the Imperial Prefect Vanis Tigo ruled the city with unrelenting fanaticism, showing no mercy to violators of Imperial law. When the new Supervisor for the system, Dedra Meero, requested that the Repaak Salyard be placed under observation under suspicions that it hid a communicator device used to contact a rebel agent, Tigo took the chance to demonstrate his power by having the yard owner, Salman Paak hanged in the central square, despite him having already confessed under intense torture to his lack of involvement with the device.
These and other events, combined with news of the Aldhani heist, the first open attack against an Imperial installation reaching Ferrix inspired influential Ferrixian and former President of the Daughters of Ferrix Maarva Andor to rebel against the Imperial occupation. She started using her knowledge of old passages and hidden tunnels to probe their headquarters and troop movements in hopes of eventually assisting the rebels to retake the planet. During one of these scouting missions she fell and was injured, having to be carried back to her house by her son's friend Brasso. She soon fell ill, but refused to take her medicine, instead secretly recording an anti-Imperial speech in hopes of having it play in her funeral. At the same time, Meero focused upon Cassian as her key to unraveling the growing rebel network under Rael, known to her as "Axis," while helping to counter the coming raid on the Spellhaus Imperial power station, being told to locate Axis upon the raid ending without prisoners being taken.
Sector Supervisor Meero wanted to use the funeral as a trap for Maarva's son, Cassian.
Maarva Andor passed away from her illness a month after her injury in the hotel tunnel, aged 77. The morning after her death, the Daughters of Ferrix, including her friend Jezzi, came over to pick up her body, which they had wrapped up and decorated with flowers. Brasso stayed with her mourning B2 groundmech salvage assist unit B2EMO who stayed in his charging station refusing to leave the house and asking for its master back. Locals, friends and neighbors of Maarva's gathered outside her house to escort her body in an impromptu procession. ISB Attendant Corv, assigned to keep tabs on Maarva in hopes of her coming in contact with her wanted son, Cassian, noticed the gathering and contacted the Prefect who in turn informed Supervisor Meero of the incident. Meero ordered all Imperial forces on high alert since it was now even more likely that Cassian would come back to the planet to pay respects to his mother; Luthen Rael, who also had his agents Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz stationed in the city to intercept Cassian -considered a liability to the team since he had gone rogue after their mission- was also informed.
Maarva Andor's funerary stone
Maarva's body was cremated per Ferrix customs and its ashes were mixed with mortar and Ferrix dust to create a pressed funerary stone. This was then inscribed with her full name and dates of birth and death in the Coruscant reckoning calendar using Bazeese script and passed over to Brasso, who was selected to carry it in the absence of her sole living relative, Cassian. The Daughters wished to hold a traditional public funeral for Maarva owing to her status as past President and upstanding citizen, and requested permission from the Prefecture to do so. Prefect Tigo was explicitly ordered by Meero to allow the funeral to go through in hopes of further attracting Cassian to the ceremony to be arrested, however he limited the number of attendants to 40 and moved the time of the ceremony from midday to two standard hours later. Roadblocks were prepared to be placed in the end of Fountain Square, right in front and around of the Prefecture headquarters in the old hotel, while a containment team and a sniper unit were placed on standby around Rix Road; the latter was removed by Meero as she needed Cassian alive. Air traffic in the area was limited and patrol units were recalled, both as a courtesy to Ferrixians and to give Cassian a false sense of security was he to actually return to the planet. The night before the funeral, Supervisor Meero personally arrived to the planet with a death trooper escort who would assist her in the arrest of Cassian.
A local band led the parade as the Daughters of Ferrix and Honor Guards followed.
On the day of the funeral, two groups of Ferrixians were assembled. The first, comprised of Daughters of Ferrix and the brass section of the Honor Guard band, gathered outside of Maarva's house where they tuned their instruments waiting for everyone to arrive; the other, comprised of Honor Guards and the woodwind section of the band gathered elsewhere. At midday, the Time Grappler began to strike his beskar anvil, signaling the beginning of the ceremony. As the Imperials watched in surprise, the two halves of the procession were assembled behind the bands, and as the musicians were playing "Forming Up," they began marching on the streets leading to Rix Road. Despite the restrictions, citizens of Ferrix joined the parade resulting in a massive gathering; by the time the Daughters and the Guards had arrived at Rix Road the funeral procession numbered hundreds of Ferrixians including Maarva's doctor Mullmoy, her close friend Pegla, her sons friends Brasso and Xanwan and Salman Paak's son Wilmon Paak who had joined the ceremony in hopes of getting close enough to the Prefecture to bomb it with a homemade explosive device in revenge of his father's death.
The procession was assembled under the bell tower and marched to Fountain Square.
Arriving in Rix Road at the same time, the two halves of the procession were assembled into one under the Ferrix bell tower with the Daughters and the Honor Guard on its head. With its two sections united, the band, led by a drummer started playing "Unto Stone We Are" and the procession marched on Rix Road towards Fountain Square and to the hotel; caught unprepared, the Imperials scrambled to set up a defensive perimeter under the command of Lieutenant Merzin Keysax. With the head of the procession halfway into Rix Road, Brasso, accompanied by B2EMO and holding Maarva's stone emerged from the crowd; simultaneously the band started playing a faster tune, "To The Sky" and the Ferrixians followed, marching faster towards the Imperials who were still struggling to assemble into a line before the hotel. Ignoring them, the Ferrixians entered and assembled around Fountain Square, at which point they stopped and made way for B2EMO to get to the middle of the street. Surrounding the droid, the crowd started chanting "Stone and Sky", while B2 deployed his holoprojector to play Maarva's speech to begin the ceremony of the Truth.
Maarva Andor's holo-recorded Truth was broadcast before the crowd during the Stone and Sky ceremony.
In it, Maarva spoke against what she perceived as the tyranny of the Empire, accusing her fellow citizens and herself of "sleeping" and failing to realize its destructive influence as long as they were payed handsomely by it. She expressed her love of Ferrix and its customs, including the one of the Truth and the ceremony of the Stone, her wish of the planet and its people to go on, but also called on Ferrixians to wake up as she failed to do and "fight these bastards." As the speech was ending with Maarva's wish to "Fight the Empire!", Vanis Tigo stepped through the trooper line and into the ceremony, pulled his cape over the droid's projector and furiously kicked it to the ground to silence it. Enraged, the crowd immediately moved in to attack him in a moment that marked the start of a resistance movement. Brasso kicked him to the chest sending him flying to the street and wrestled two security troopers attempting to rescue their captain to the ground. Tigo took the opportunity to crawl under the crowd's feet back behind the trooper line.
Tigo's violent interruption of the funeral sparked a riot.
Noticing Tigo's escape, the crowd rushed in to attack but were stopped by the security troopers who had formed a wall with their riot shields to protect their officer. More and more people were rushing towards the hotel, pressing the line who responded by bashing them with batons and zapping them with zap rods, pulling the injured protestors back to detain them in the hotel. Amidst the chaos, Wilmon Paak pulled out the bomb from his satchel and threw it towards the Imperials. The blast shattered the hotel windows, instantly killing several stormtroopers and troopers stationed inside it as well as a Ferrixian informant, and detonated a crate of N-20 Baradium-core thermal detonator. The blasts destroyed the façade of the hotel as well as two armed speeders, killed protestors and Imperials alike, and prompted an immediate response by Imperial security forces in the form of open fire against the remaining Ferrixians still in the square. With the ceremony interrupted, Brasso took Maarva's droid and funerary stone with him as he escaped the planet along with other Ferrixians; the ceremony was ultimately never resumed and Maarva's stone was not interred to a city wall as per the custom.
Maarva's son Cassian had indeed returned to the planet to attend the funeral as was predicted by both the ISB and Luthen Rael. He was, however able to escape from his pursuers amidst the riot. Disgusted by the atrocities he witnessed and the slaughter of his home planet's citizens, he joined Axis network after the funeral to actively fight against the Empire. He would go on to become a valuable member of the Alliance Intelligence, eventually recovering the DS-1 Death Star's plans along with Jyn Erso during the Battle of Scarif, an integral part of the successful Rebel attempt to ultimately destroy the station in the Battle of Yavin.
The funeral was first mentioned in "Daughter of Ferrix" and appeared in "Rix Road," the final episode of the first season of the television series Andor.
Executive producer and writer Tony Gilroy said the first comp for the funeral was between the Provisional IRA funerals, and the other comp is the joy and soul of a New Orleans second line funeral procession. The funeral procession for Maarva Andor was the first element that Gilroy worked on, particularly the music. He was insistent on having real instruments be played by on-screen actors instead of professional musicians, and it would be recorded on the Ferrix set in Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Two years before shooting started, Gilroy and composer Nicholas Britell worked together to create a seven-minute piece. Britell made sure that the piece would be about the people of Ferrix as well as be a tradition they would naturally connect with. He knew the sound would have to feel like it was part of the people's folk tradition and be meaningful enough that it could bring them together. Gilroy said the funeral came alive to him through the civic procession. He also said the funeral advanced Ferrix's personality and showed that the people cared for each other.
Costume designer Michael Wilkinson and his team amped up the red to be a very strong symbol of the spirit of Ferrix. To accomplish this, Maarva Andor's red jumpsuit echoed in the red cloaks worn during the procession. According to Gilroy, everything on Ferrix was filmed first. Actress Denise Gough, who portrayed Dedra Meero, said that the voice of Fiona Shaw as Maarva surrounded those who were filming the scene. Maarva's monologue originally ended with her saying "Fuck the Empire!" though it was changed to "Fight the Empire!" in the episode.