Dvd Collection - Main Level - FOREIGN AFT
What if the afterlife is not what we expect? What if heaven was simply one happy memory from a person’s life that would be repeated for eternity? Would you be able to pick just one memory to take with you to heaven and let go of everything else? This is the premise of the Japanese film After Life . In this world, when a person dies they are sent to a way station building where they have three days to decide on the perfect memory they want to forever relive in heaven. The departed souls are given case worker type individuals to help them along the process and chose their memory. Several of the souls are having trouble making a decision because some feel their lives were empty while others do not think one memory can sum up an entire life. Throughout the story, one of the caseworkers, Takashi, comes to re-evaluate his own afterlife when a client turns out to have married his former fiancée after Takashi was killed in the Second World War.
The film is incredibly low key. It poses many existential questions and naturally examines the nature of life and death. Learning to let go but also to celebrate the goodness in our lives are important themes of the movie. The bureaucratic nature of limbo was both amusing but might seem alarming at first to some people. Would you really want the first part of your afterlife to seem like the start of a job or loan interview? But it is clear that the caseworkers do have compassion and are just trying to comfort these people. The film presents a multitude of life stories from people that come from all walks of life during the client interviews. I have learned that some of the stories were actually real people telling about their lives to the camera. Yet despite all the differences between these people and their stories, they all want the same thing: to simply be happy and find a way to define their lives. That is an uplifting message that can apply to everyone no matter where they are from.
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