1998/35mm/118mins/color

Distribution Contact:

Artistic License Films

250 West 57th Street, Suite 606

New York, NY 10107

212.265.9124 Fax 212.262.9299

Publicity Contact:

Susan Norget

125 East 7th Street, #5W

New York, NY 10009

212.477.3194 Fax 212.477.3211

"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.

Director KORE-EDA Hirokazu

Screenplay KORE-EDA Hirokazu

Executive Producers SHIGENOBU Yutaka, YASUDA Masahiro

Producers SATO Shiho , AKIEDA Masayuki

Chief Assistant Director TAKAHASHI Iwao

Chief Assistant Line Producer SHIRAISHI Osamu

Assistant Director ASANO Naohiro , NISHIKAWA Miwa , KIN Teiitsu

Cameraman YAMAZAKI Yutaka , SUKITA Masayoshi

Lighting SATO Yuzuru, NAKAMURA Shigeki

Art Director ISOMI Toshihiro, GUNJI Hideo

Composer KASAMATSU Yasuhiro

Sound Engineer TAKIZAWA Osamu

Editor KORE-EDA Hirokazu

A TV MAN UNION Inc., ENGINE FILM Inc. production.

Cast

ARATA

ODA Erika

TERAJIMA Susumu

NAITO Takashi

TANI Kei

NAITO Taketoshi

YURI Toru

YOKOYAMA Akio

ABE Sadao

SHODA Kisuke

SHIRAKAWA Kazuko

ISEYA Yusuke

HARA Hisako

YOSHINO Sayaka

SHIGA Kotaro

ISHIDOU Natsuo

KAGAWA Kyoko

The narrative portions of After Life are photographed in 16mm by YAMAZAKI Yutaka, the award-winning cinematographer of more than 100 documentary films. In order to convey the delicate, ambiguous nature of human memory, KORE-EDA invited the renowned still photographer SUKITA Masayoshi, who worked with Jim Jarmusch on Mystery Train, to film the memory sequences. Each memory has been given a distinctive visual and aural treatment, employing a mixture of black and white, color, 8mm and 16mm film stocks.

SATO Shiho, who has collaborated closely with KORE-EDA for the last five years, produced After Life with executive producer, SHIGENOBU Yutaka. Mr. Shigenobu, President of TV Man Union, has won numerous awards for many other films, including Maborosi.

Newcomer ARATA, whom KORE-EDA chose out of hundreds of young actors, leads the cast in the role of Mochizuki. The old man Watanabe is played by NAITO Taketoshi, whose performance was acclaimed in Hikarigoke, featured in the 1992 Berlin Film Festival. KAGAWA Kyoko, who has appeared in films directed by Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, joins the cast in the role of Watanabe's wife. NAITO Takashi, who appeared in Maborosi, and TERAJIMA Susumu, who appeared in TAKESHI Kitano's Sonatine and Hana-Bi, are also featured in the film.

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.

My grandfather became senile when I was six. The word Alzheimer's did not yet exist and no one in my family or in our community understood what had happened to him. His forgetfulness began with pestering my mother to serve meals we had just finished eating. Gradually he began to lose his way on familiar streets and had to be escorted home by the local police. One day, he no longer recognized our faces. Finally he could not recognize his own. As a child, I comprehended little of what I saw, but I remember thinking that people forgot everything when they died. I now understand how critical memories are to our identity, to a sense of self.

My memories of my bewildered grandfather inspired me to base this film on memories of real people and to use many of those people in my cast. When we were developing the script, we asked more than 500 people to recount the one memory they would choose to take with them to heaven. I was intrigued by how often people chose upsetting experiences. The first half of the film uses actors working from scripts, actors recounting their own experiences, and really people telling true stories. Of course, as they tell real stories for the camera people inevitably fictionalize aspects of them, consciously or not, whether because of pride or misunderstanding

For instance, during the scene in which the old woman's memory is recreated, she realizes that she got certain things wrong. She begins to understand her experience in a different way. At moments, she is troubled by it... I was interested in recording her shifting emotions as she came to terms with her memory. I saw that human emotions are the sparks that fly when "truth" and "fiction" collide. In this film, I wanted to explore the consequences of such collision by investigating the uncertain area between "objective record" and "recollection."

Although the memories in After Life are presented as real experiences that are later reconstructed as film, you can't really distinguish the stories characters tell as "truth" and the recreations as "fiction." They intertwine with great complexity. Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing. So the act of remembering, of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative. Rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature.

The recreation of memories allow the dead to come to terms with the past, affirming and accepting their lives in the process. But the task of re-creating also gives Mochizuki and the others who have failed to choose memories a chance to re-evaluate their own lives. It offers respite to those who couldn't find meaning in their past. In a sense, After Life is the story of how, in their own ways both Mochizuki, and his counterpart, Shiori, mature. The entire premise of the film is allegorical, as it is in Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait.

In After Life, Mochizuki finally chooses the memory of the moment when he discovered meaning in his own past. He only discovers that meaning because of Kyoko's experience. For me, this is the central revelation of the film --that the accumulation of any person's life is embedded in the chain of human experiences. Bits and pieces of our selves are held in the minds of everyone we encounter in life.

As a filmmaker, I find that my work distracts from my own experience. I think this may be true for other filmmakers. At one point I really struggled with this, but making After Life has helped me to view filmmaking differently. Although this is a film about memory, it is also a film about what it means to make films.