iFilm Connections: Asia & Pacific

Afterlife

Wandafuru raifu (1999)

In Kore-eda Hirokazu's new film, "After Life," limbo is nothing but a cold classroom in a nondescript building. While the "afterlife" sub-genre is known for symbolically heavy or special-effects driven films like "Ghost" or "What Dreams May Come," "After Life" dismisses all extraneous devices, stripping down the film to a calm, introspective meditation. In Hirokazu's vision, the dead file silently into a classroom where they are given simple, uneventful instructions about what will happen to them next. Each person is assigned to a filmmaker who will help them choose a moment from their lives to recreate-a single moment that they will take with them into the undefined beyond. Choosing is easy for some and utterly frustrating or impossible for others. One man simply refuses. Another must wade through stacks of videotaped moments of his life-a lonely, humiliating experience. After the script is written and locations are chosen-or the soundstage is prepared-the dead act out their memories with supporting casts. On the last day, they watch their edited pieces in a small screening room, after which they pass on.

Known for both documentaries ("Without Memory," "August Without Him") and narrative features ("Maboroshi"), Hirokazu utilizes the strengths of both forms in "After Life." Culled from years of source material provided by Hirokazu's documentary shooting, "After Life" is as much an intriguing window into the importance of small moments as it is an inventive use of small-scale cinema. Through the process of building these once insignificant slices-of-life into a document, the film's subjects are granted a unique perspective. Significantly for an afterlife film, the deeds of their lives aren't measured against heavenly scales of right and wrong. Life has simply been a dress rehearsal for their final close-ups.

After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hirokazu was keen on finding a warm home for his film with a distributor who has the patience for developing and expanding a growing market for Asian film in the States. As we go to press, the film was acquired by Artistic License Films.

Filmmaker (F): How did you develop the script for "After Life?"

Hirokazu (H): I actually wrote the basis for the script ten years ago when I was just starting out in filmmaking, and I wrote it as a script in which actors would play in a fictionalized setting. But in the intervening years I made about eight documentaries, and I began to find a keener sense of reality in a look that briefly crosses someone's eyes or in an expression that forms for a moment when a person is telling a real story or when a real person is contemplating real life. That to me is more meaningful than an actor providing that in a fictionalized setting. So I decided what I wanted to do was have a more fictional framework but incorporate real people telling real stories into that framework. And by incorporating that, I wanted to have a collision between their reality and the world of fiction that I had written, and I was hoping that different kinds of spark would fly from that collision.

F: Were you surprised by what you got?

H: What I encountered far surpassed anything I could have imagined. First of all, I wasn't sure that any real person would come and agree to be on a film set with the understanding that they're [playing themselves as] already dead and telling a story from their life. Not only did they agree, but they seemed to really enjoy telling their stories on the set. But even more than that, through the presence of these real people and the profound authenticity that they brought to the set, the actors playing the "After Life" staff couldn't fall back on their regular tricks. You can tell when the actors are trying to help recreate the memories of the "dead." They seem very genuinely, earnestly engaged in trying to recreate them and really thrilled when it seems to be working. In fact, there are some people in the film who are professional actors brought on to play a certain role but who ended up telling a different story-their own story.

F: You said you were surprised that people chose upsetting experiences as their memory. Why?

H: Many more people chose moments of difficulty or struggle than I would have anticipated. And I think specifically with men, many older men chose memories of war. When death is at hand, life becomes more vivid. And it's a shame, really, because it shouldn't take death for life to be vivid. But I think often, when we are engaged in struggle, those memories are etched more deeply perhaps, more profoundly in ourselves than other memories.

F: As a person who doesn't speak the language, it's nearly impossible to translate tone of voice. But watching the expressions of these people, you feel none of them are actors. They all seemed to be relaying memories that many times caught them off guard. How did you cultivate those innuendoes and gestures?

H: In terms of technique, first of all, I kept the crew down to the absolute minimum. Also, I felt that any lighting would make them tense, so we went with all natural light and raised the sensitivity of the film so that we could roll as long as possible. We shot on 16mm so that we would only have to change rolls every 10 minutes. And I never told anyone to stop talking. The only way to get them to talk naturally was to just let them talk in whatever order they wanted to tell their story. And if that meant rolling for an hour, even though the producer was sweating in the background, it meant rolling for an hour.

F: How many hours of footage did you shoot?

H: 30 hours. My approach from the very beginning was documentary-like. The cameraman I almost exclusively use now is a veteran of docs for 30 years, but it had been years since he shot on film. Most Japanese docs are shot on video.

F: How long was the shoot?

H: 35 days.

F: There is a Hollywood film titled "Defending Your Life" in which the dead have to defend their lives to a panel of judges. Each trial is a review of the dead person's life through filmed moments, very much like "After Life." But the judges based their reincarnation decision on the extent of a person's bravery or courage. Your film is utterly different.

H: When I watched "Defending Your Life," my first impulse was, "Oh, this is so American." Certainly, the idea of having videos that you would look back on after life, I thought, "Oh, I guess I'm not the only one in the world with an idea like that." But I think that what I set out to do in my film is entirely different from what [Albert Brooks] set out to do in his film.

F: In "After Life," the videotapes look like they were shot by a cold security camera-in a wide, long shot. It's emotionless. You get the feeling that the person watching their life roll by on a stagnant television is utterly alone.

H: That's exactly what I was trying to do. Obviously, the videos had to be shot by someone, but they certainly weren't guided by any emotion. And they really are in that sense like the images a security camera would pick up. It's simply a record stripped of any emotion. I wanted to contrast them with the memories that are being recreated and filmed by the staff. These memories are suffused not only with the subject's emotions but with their reaction and the emotional support of the staff and the filmmakers as they watch the memories. What happens is that the subject then changes. These emotionless images provoke emotion, and a shift in perspective in how the subject sees it. So at first he's just bored and depressed-the gaze of that security camera never changes-but his gaze towards those images shifts from having seen them. So, even though it's an idle afternoon in the park, he recognizes something in it.

F: Do you have any directors or filmmakers in mind that you would like to have film or recreate one of your memories?

H: Great question! Yeah, but there's two conditions. First, the director already has to be dead. And he has to be working [in the afterlife]. Even if I choose a director that I want, what if he has already come to terms with his life and has moved on to the other place and he isn't in limbo anymore?

F: So it sounds like you are going to have a lot of trouble in limbo.

H: That would be a tough one. I guess what I would have to do is first die, wait for a director I like to die, and then grab him while he's there.

F: So while you're waiting, you can be a filmmaker in limbo.

H: That sounds perfect!

From Filmmaker, Vol. 7 (February-April, 1999)

Heaven's Gate
By Interview,