Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:00 pm
Japanese Society
333 E 47th St, New York, NY
1998, 118 min., 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. With Arata, Erika Oda, Susumu Terashima, Tsuyoshi Naito, Kei Tani, Toru Yuri, Hisako Hara, Kazuko Shirakawa.
Richie recognized the remarkable talent of a young Hirokazu Kore-eda from his debut film Maboroshi (1995) and continued to promote the director’s films thereafter. The passing of time has come to justify Richie’s early endorsement yet again, as Kore-eda has since become one of the brightest Japanese talents on the international film scene. After Life, Kore-eda’s second film, features his trademark sensitivity and humanism through a fantastical tale in which the recently deceased arrive at a way station before going onto the next world, having to determine the one memory to take with them. A seasoned TV documentarian, Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of Japanese people, asking them to reflect on their lives, and even used some of the original footage within the film in a seamless hybrid of fact and fiction. After Life remains a reflexive and thoughtful meditation on the fragile power of both memory and cinema as potential vehicles for transcendence. With this film, Roger Ebert said Kore-eda “earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema. His films embrace the mystery of life, and encourage us to think about why we are here, and what makes us truly happy.”
Donald Richie on After Life: “A thoughtful and moving elegy in which the dead line up to be processed into the next world. Their passport is the single memory they choose to take with them. This is then filmed by a dedicated staff–comprised of those who could not or would not themselves choose a memory. ”
For more information, please go:
http://www.japansociety.org/event/after-life