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After Life
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda's interest in the parallel worlds of life and death, which he touched upon in his 1995 feature Maborosi, is the prime concern of After Life, a elegiac meditation on mortality. The film is set in Limbo, a holding station between Heaven and the corporal world where angelic counsellors help newly deceased souls to find their own private eternity: the one moment in their previous lives when they were truly, completely happy. Each soul is given two days to find that perfection: those that succeed enter the gates to eternal bliss, those who do not, or cannot, remain forever in stasis. After Life focuses on one such in-transit soul, that of a 70-year-old man who believes he will never find Heaven, and his relationship with the young Limbo staff member enlisted to help him make the transition. Simple and uncluttered, Kore-eda's work lingers on the mind by virtue of its honesty and humanity. It's beautifully scripted and impeccably photographed, bound together by moving recollections, some of them improvised to camera by non-actors. Films this good should be given a much wider release, not confined to a single cinema for one week and then exiled to video.
