Released in Association with Ronald Guttman and Sputnik Productions "A Masterpiece!" - John Anderson,  Newsday "The director of the multi-prize winning Maborosi has created  another serious, moving, and  beautifully crafted film..." - Donald Richie,  International Herald Tribune After Life is a new feature film by KORE-EDA Hirokazu, the award-winning director of Maborosi (1995). Based on KORE-EDA's original screenplay, After Life explores our profound human need to discover meaning in everyday life. After Life is set at a way station between Heaven and Earth. There, guides have less than a week to help the newly dead sift through their memories for one defining moment to take with them to Heaven. As the film discovers, finding a life's worth of meaning in a single event is no simple task. Interactions between the soul-searching dead and their dedicated guides explore the range of human experience. The film centers on the grudging respect that develops between Watanabe, an undistinguished old man, coming to terms with his uneventful life, and Mochizuki, the young guide assigned to help him. After Life draws on the recollections of hundreds of elderly Japanese, some of whom join the cast of the film. Their stories reveal not only their personal pleasures and horrors, but also the broader history of postwar Japan. By portraying characters struggling to come to terms with the past, the film explores our attachment to life - bursting with pride and falsehood, pain, and pleasure - and, most importantly, to love. ARATA, a newcomer chosen among hundreds of actors, leads the cast in the role of Mochizuki. NAITO Taketoshi plays the old man, Watanabe. The supporting cast includes KAGAWA Kyoko and TERAJIMA Susumu. The film also introduces ODA Erika as Shiori Satonaka. About the Director KORE-EDA Hirokazu came to international attention in August 1995 when Maborosi, his first narrative feature film, was screened at the Venice Film Festival and awarded the Ozella D'oro. Maborosi, a mesmerizing hymn to a woman's grief after her husband's unexplained suicide, alerted international audiences to the emergence of an extraordinarily talented Japanese filmmaker. The film traveled to more than twenty film festivals, won many awards and has been distributed internationally. Prior to his narrative debut, KORE-EDA directed and produced documentary films for Japanese television. Whether portraying the first Japanese gay man to publicly announce having AIDS or a Korean-Japanese citizen on the run after being accused of being a spy, KORE-EDA has turned his thoughtful, penetrating gaze to lives that Japanese society mostly ignores. KORE-EDA's seventh documentary, Without Memory, was broadcast on Japan's government network, NHK, in 1996 and received Japan's most prestigious award for documentary television. The filmmaker spent three years filming a man trapped in a present that forever slips away, the result of profound brain damage caused by negligent hospital care. Working with themes he has been developing for over a decade, KORE-EDA has recently completed his second narrative feature, After Life. Returning to the themes of loss and memory he explored in Maborosi and Without Memory, KORE-EDA's new film is an original, poignant and universal story about life. To order the video for After Life visit: www.newyorkerfilms.com/newyorkerfilms/html/video_dvd/nr_v.htm Related Sites The Journal of Religion and Film Edited by: William L. Blizek and Ronald R. Burke Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Artistic License provides both Press Kit. Further information can be found at KORE-EDA Hirokazu's site and at the "After Life" page.