Synopsis

Hirokazu Kore-ede’s (Nobody Knows) award-winning film is a warm and inventive story about what matters in the world beyond.

At a station somewhere between heaven and earth, the newly dead are greeted by guides that help the dead look through their memories and find the one defining moment of their lives.

The guides are then tasked to re-create the past as the dead remember it, so that they may always keep with them their most beloved of remembrances.



But what of the mysterious guides and their strange jobs of inspiring and then remaking and evoking events and emotions from the past?

Were they once alive too, did they have memories? Kore-eda’s film explores a universal, human theme with an unusual story suffused in a glowing mysteriousness to find what is most touching, most surprising, most romantic, and ultimately most memorable about the lives people live.

Cast: Arata, Erika Oda, Takashi Naitô, Kei Tani, Susumu Terajima, Kyôko Kagawa, Taketoshi Naitô, Tôru Yuri, Yûsuke Iseya, Sayaka Yoshino, Kazuko Shirakawa, Kotaro Shiga, Hisako Hara, Sadao Abe, Natsuo Ishidô

Produced by: Masayuki Akieda, Shiho Sato
Cinematography: Yutaka Yamazaki
Edited by: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Music by: Yasuhiro Kasamatsu


San Sebastián (Competition): FIPRESCI Prize, San Francisco, Toronto (New Beat of Japan), London, Sundance (World Cinema), Rotterdam (Main Programme), BAFICI (International Competition): Best Film, Best Screenplay, Vancouver (Dragons & Tigers), AFI FEST

It premiered on 11 September 1998 at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival and distributed in over 30 countries, bringing international recognition to Kore-eda's work.

The film was also shown at the 1998 San Sebastián International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI prize "for its universal theme, its empathy for nostalgia and its homage to cinema as transcending life". The film received seven awards and eight nominations worldwide.

In August 2021, The Criterion Collection announced a re-release of the film, in a 2K remaster together with interviews, deleted scenes, audio commentary and an essay by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen.