"After Life " screens Thursday Oct 17 at SMoCA Lounge

Oct. 7, 2013 - PRLog -- “After Life” a film directed by KORE-EDA Hirokazu

Thursday, October 17, 2013 7:30 (doors at 7pm)

SMoCA Lounge at SMoCA (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art)

7373 East 2^nd Street (Scottsdale Civic Center), Scottsdale AZ

$7.00 admission-advance tickets available at SMoCA or call 480-874-4666

Website for stills, press kit etc-

http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/After-Life-%281998%29/1/73/ DO NOT PUBLISH

This film is programmed in conjunction with the exhibition “The Narrow Road to the Interior”. Sponsored by SMoCA and Sechler CPA PC (http://www.azcpa.com)

After Life is a 1995 feature film by KORE-EDA Hirokazu, the award-winning director of Maborosi. Based on KORE-EDA's original screenplay, After Life explores our profound human need to discover meaning in everyday life.

After Life is set at a way station between Heaven and Earth. There, guides have less than a week to help the newly dead sift through their memories for one defining moment to take with them to Heaven. As the film discovers, finding a life's worth of meaning in a single event is no simple task.

Interactions between the soul-searching dead and their dedicated guides explore the range of human experience. The film centers on the grudging respect that develops between Watanabe, an undistinguished old man, coming to terms with his uneventful life, and Mochizuki, the young guide assigned to help him.

After Life draws on the recollections of hundreds of elderly Japanese, some of who join the cast of the film. Their stories reveal not only their personal pleasures and horrors, but also the broader history of postwar Japan. By portraying characters struggling to come to terms with the past, the film explores our attachment to life - bursting with pride and falsehood, pain, and pleasure - and, most importantly, to love.