JAPANESE ARTHOUSE 101: AFTER LIFE (1998)

Cross-posted with LA & OC Weirdo Music & Art Forum

Date: Monday, September 22, 7:45

Venue: Frida Cinema
305 E 4th St #100, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Phone: (714) 285-9422

Dinner 6:15 TBD

Tickets: $9 https://thefridacinema.org/movies/after-life/

Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 89% positive rating.

Trailer here

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda Run Time: 118 min. Release Year: 1999 Language: Japanese

Starring: Arata Iura, Erika Oda, Kei Tani, Susumu Terajima, Takashi Naito

Closing out our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1999 award-winning masterwork After Life (original Japanese title: Wandafuru raifu), a stunning and thought-provoking meditation on life and death.

In After Life, the recently deceased arrive at a waystation between this world and the next. Their task? To choose a single memory from their lives to take with them into eternity. A small team of counselors helps each soul re-create that memory on film, allowing them to move on—leaving everything else behind.

With a mix of actors and real interviews, After Life blurs the line between fiction and documentary, imagination and memory. The result is a quietly transcendent film that contemplates the meaning of life not through grand events, but through small, deeply human moments.
Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century. All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles, at a reduced ticket price of $8.

Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema