After Life (1999)

What a concept and executed with confidence and consideration to the audience.You don't really know coming in but the lighting kind of gives it away. Still the movie trust that you are smart enough to pick it up. It doesn't go to the Sixth sense hyperbole.Albeit some of the stories are not as real as it could be, but it takes the time, tells you about the typical human nuance of regrets, hope and dreams.It is slow but it needs to be slow but it worked out its logic and and sets the pace of this place - into our heart.

1st watched 2/6/2010 – 6 out of 10 (Dir:Kore-eda Hirokazu): Absorbing yet slow-moving drama about a station between death and everlasting life where people go to choose one memory from their past to forever be presented to them in the rest of their existence. The movie is kind of filmed in a realistic documentary style as we are shown the workplace, the workers and then the 22 people who have recently died and have to choose their one memory this week. The way it works is they have three days to choose and work with a counselor who helps them. The workers then recreate the scene with the person from the memory kind of directing the piece that they will forever see. Once they are shown the final cut they miraculously disappear and are sent to their final resting place. The movie is initially about the deceased and the process they go thru, but then we learn about the workers and why they are there also. They are there because they were unable or chose not to choose themselves when they died -- so they are kind of sentenced to help others choose until they figure it out. OK, so the process is complicated but the power of the movie is what it does inside you while watching it. You start thinking about what you'd choose (if anything). The slow pace almost kills the movie's effectiveness despite it's message though as you wait patiently for an ending. This is definitely a unique movie but it would be hard to watch more than once – but it would be worth the one watch.

The premise of this story is that upon your death, you stay for one week at a nondescript establishment where sympathetic councillors help you to select ONE outstanding memory from your life. Whatever you chose, (if you decide to chose) will be made into a short film, and you will live within that life-defining memory for all eternity. Many of the after-lifers are non-actors and it is their memories that give an emotional weight to this beautifully realised piece; the elderly lady whose wartime memory of dancing for her brother in her new red dress is beautifully poignant; the man who discovers that he has wasted his life by devotion to a job that he hates, and the teenager who cannot chose between a trip to Disneyland and the smell of her mother. Every once in a while, a movie come along that astonishes and delights, and it is for wonderful movies like this that I cheerfully wade through hundreds of hours of mediocre, derivative dross. This is a life-affirming and deeply humanistic meditation on what it means to live a good life. I absolutely recommend this beautiful, uplifting movie.

I saw After as part of the Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This film should be compulsory viewing for film students. It proves that a good story put together inventively is all it takes to produce a compelling film. With scarce resources and mostly non-professional actors, Kore-eda has ingeniously contrived an alternate reality, where people go at the time of death. No pearly gates, no angels, no hell-fire - just bureaucrats in government buildings (or so they seemed to this writer), processing the dead, and extracting from them their lives' fondest memories to be made into videos.This idea is almost comical, yet it works beautifully. Clearly there's a humorous element, but Kore-eda plays it matter-of-fact serious, almost like a documentary. For me it strongly recalls some of the early fiction films of Kieslowski (like Camera Buff) which evolved out of the documentary format. The film shares the beautifully raw aesthetics of Camera Buff and Blind Chance and with the latter's metaphysical exploration. Having seen at MIFF all but one of Kore-eda's films (Distance, which I plan to see on Tuesday), this is my favourite so far. But each of the films I have seen thus far are very different in content and style to each other. This film is both enjoyable and moving.