One of the great services that cinema has done for mankind is to provide a vision of the unseen. Whether that be intricately-detailed recreations of our distant past, explorations of societies and natural wonders as they exist today or exciting glimpses into an imagined future, movies have given life to landscapes and journeys of which most of us can only dream. Filmmakers have had plenty to work with when constructing these images - historical records and documents, modern camera technologies, scientific indicators. There is only one true frontier that is entirely open to artistic interpretation; one final, vast landscape that every living soul contemplates but which only a select few have seen and lived to tell of the experience - the afterlife.
–Simon Foster
Japanese films are always a delight to watch. I stumbled upon this gem of a film when I was seventeen and I haven't gotten tired of re-watching this film since then. Director Hirokazu Koreeda tells a story in a quiet, unassuming way and his films are all humanistic in their own right. The premise of this film is a simple one. The newly departed find themselves at a gateway to heaven, where they are given a week to select a memory that is most meaningful or precious to them. There is a time limit of three days to select a memory, after which the staff will do their best to recreate the memory on film. Every saturday, the films are screened and as soon as someone has relived their memory, they will move on, spending eternity with only that memory with them. The film raises interesting questions about the afterlife and challenges us to think about things that we usually set aside in our everyday lives. If you had to choose one memory to spend eternity with, what would you choose? What truly makes us happy? Afterlife has provided us with a vision of the unknown. What happens after death comes to take us away? Perhaps spending eternity with nothing but a single treasured memory is an ideal depiction of what heaven will be like.
