Ackland Film Forum: “After Life” (1998, Japan)
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Ackland Film Forum | Spring 2019
Fantastic Voyage: Cinematic Journeys into the Brain
Tuesday, 26 March 2019 | 7 PM
Varsity Theatre, 123 E. Franklin Street
After Life (1998, Japan), D. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 118 m.
TICKETS:
Free for UNC One Card holders; $7 general public. Tickets available at the Varsity Theatre Box Office.
With last year’s success of Shoplifters (2018), the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda is finally getting the attention he deserves for his closely studied portraits of people living at the margins of society. In his second film, After Life, Kore-eda brings together documentary and fiction to explore the limits of human memory to recognize love and cope with grief. The premise of the film is simple. After one dies, they enter a purgatory-like institution where they have one week to select a memory from their life to carry with them in the next world. The institution’s staff work with the recently deceased to select their memory and then, in a nod to the miracle of cinema, work to help recreate the experience so it can be permanently recorded. While Kore-eda’s humanism is on full display in this film, what stays with you is his insistence that the search for happiness requires a willingness to engage fully with our past, even those moments we have forgotten or come to regret.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Spring 2019 Ackland Film Forum series “Fantastic Voyage: Cinematic Journeys into the Brain” is organized by the Ackland Art Museum and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature and presented in connection with the Ackland’s exhibition The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (25 Jan – 7 April 2019).
