Five Flavors Festival: After Life

TypeHall 2 - Audiovisual

Hour

22.11

|

January 13 |

THE POETICS OF SPIRITUALITY

In one of Hirokaz Koreeda's most tender and extraordinary films, the dead end up in purgatory suspended between life and eternity. Here they meet carers who help them prepare for the further journey. However, before they leave, they have to pick one most important memory and recreate it in the form of a movie. After the projection, the memory becomes their only trace — and they themselves disappear. “After Life” is therefore a film about the art of choice: a single image, a smell, a meeting or a brief moment that is worth saving from oblivion.

Koreeda creates a vision of the afterlife that is not bound by religious dogma — deeply rooted in everyday experience. He is not interested in answering the question of what awaits us after death. Instead, he asks what of our lives deserves to be taken with us further. The director spent months talking in Tokyo with people he met by chance, asking about the most important memories. Their answers became the canvas of the script, some of the interlocutors Koreeda invited to the film set. Thus arose a documentary fantasy in which a fictional purgatory becomes a meeting place of individual and collective memory. Without one religion, without revelation, and without the certainty of what lies on the other side. There is only memory — and an attempt to save the most important from it.

The film is dedicated to the memory of Jagoda Murczyńska, a longtime organizer and programmer of Five Flavors, who died in February 2022. (Lukasz Mankowski)

AFTER LIFE, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan 1998, 118'

Language: Japanese with Polish and English subtitles

--For whom: youth, adults

Venue: Sala 2 - Audiowizualna

tickets: 27 zł (n), 25 zł (u), 22 zł (with Kinomana Card)