Film: After Life (Wandafuru raifu)

April 3, 2001

Film: After Life (Wandafuru raifu)
Directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu (Visiting Fellow of the Donald Keene Center)
Roone Arledge Cinema, Lerner Hall, Columbia University (115th St. & Broadway)
7:00 PM
Part of “Countries and Cities in East Asian Film” Series

Newly dead people assemble in a kind of limbo (it looks like an old school) and are asked to choose, after a polite interview, a single memory of happiness. A celestial film crew then makes a movie of that moment, and the shade is allowed to live with the memory for all eternity. In this sombre, delicate Japanese fantasy, written and directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu (a former documentary-maker), the light is gray and even, the emotions tranquil, the politeness exquisite. Kore-eda has no interest in orgiasts or roller-coaster riders: the cherished moment, it turns out, may be nothing more than a passing mood of pleasure—a breeze felt at a window—or a pleasure given rather than one received. The picture raises a marvelous, fanciful question: Are all movies simply the favorite dreams of the dead? With Naito Taketoshi as a fastidious elderly man whose life was too uneventful to yield an easy choice.

– The New Yorker

Mr. Kore-eda is a Visiting Fellow of the Donald Keene Center, under a program supported by the United States-Japan Foundation.

Co-sponsored by the East Asian Institute, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Center for Chinese Cultural and Institutional History, and the Film Division of the School of the Arts