After Life

Awarded the Montgolfière d’or in 1998, After Life takes quite literally – and not without humour – Cocteau’s well-known formula that cinema is death at work. Kore-eda imagines a place, a liminal world, where the deceased of all ages are asked to choose just one of their memories. This will then be staged and filmed so they can keep it forever in the after-life. The documentary aspect of the film, which is structured as a series of camera-facing interviews and a sort of “making-of” of this small memory factory, is the setting for a moving collection of ordinary lives. This device is also a way of averting the terror of death, which is a recurring theme in the cinema of Kore-eda. AR