These otherwordly social workers double as filmmakers, it turns out. Their job is not to comfort the recently deceased, but to isolate that one perfect moment from their lives and then shoot it as a low-budget film. Perfect moment having been recreated, the dead are free to proceed into the rest of the afterlife -- with that single image taking the place in their memory of all the rest of their human lives.

Kore-eda approaches this fanciful scenario with a filmmaker's keen interest in the relationship between memory and cinema -- or between reality and documentary. The film took shape during interviews with some 500 ordinary people, who were asked which of their own worldly memories they would choose if quizzed on the subject in the afterworld. Of the 22 souls who arrive at After Life's limbo during the film, 10 are non-actors who were discovered during these interviews. By interspersing their ad libs with scripted and unscripted sequences featuring "real" actors, the first section of the film takes on an authenticity that's by turns compelling and utterly ordinary.

Later, the line between movie and memory is blurred in some gently comic scenes showing the staffers fashioning clouds from wisps of cotton, or trying to figure out how to reproduce physical sensations in a filmed image. What's always clear is the appreciation on the faces of the subjects, delighted at the opportunity to relive their lost happiness. The irony is that the facsimile of the event -- the movie version rather than the chemical traces of the experience itself -- is the artifact that will accompany them for the rest of eternity.

It's a beautiful and provocative film, even when it's forced to find an excuse for its own existence. Eventually, a story does emerge from the confusion of tale-telling, which pushes the movie toward a sentimentality that I didn't appreciate so much at the time -- though, perhaps appropriately, it has grown in my memory. The film remains level-headed throughout, with suitably ethereal performances, especially from newcomers Oda Erika and Arata in the central roles of counselors (and close friends) Shiori and Mochizuki.

Japan, 1998