Hirokazu Koreeda

A group of newly-dead people are in a way station between heaven and Earth where they are given three days to choose a favorite memory which they will relive for eternity.

After the death of his father, a struggling author working as a private detective tries to reconnect with his aging mother, his ex-wife, and his son.

In Koreeda's thought-provoking vision, the newly deceased find themselves in a way station somewhere between Heaven and Earth. With the help of dedicated caseworkers, each soul is given three days to choose one cherished memory for their life that they will relive for eternity. As the film reveals, recognizing happiness and finding a life's worth of meaning in a single event is no simple task.

Affluent architects Ryota and his wife Midori face a terrible dilemma when they learn that their six-year-old son, Keita, was accidentally switched at birth and is not their biological child. In the wake of this revelation, Ryota's sense of fatherhood is shaken to the core as he witnesses both his wife's enduring devotion to Keita and his own conflicting feelings of nature versus nurture. Now his decision on which boy is truly his son will change...

On the margins of Tokyo, a dysfunctional band of outsiders are united by fierce loyalty, a penchant for petty theft, and playful grifting. When the young son is arrested, secrets are exposed that upend their tenuous, below-the-radar existence.

"If you could choose only one memory to hold on to for eternity, what would it be? That's the question at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda's revelatory international breakthrough, a bittersweet fantasia in which the recently deceased find themselves in a limbo where they must select a single cherished moment from their life to be recreated on film for them to take into the next world. After Life's high-concept premise is grounded in Kore-eda's documentary-like...