Hirokazu Koreeda

A critically-acclaimed and powerful, heartfelt story about four children who are forced to rely on one another after they are abandoned by their mother.

"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 and test their quietly radical belief that it is love--not blood--that defines a family."--Container.

Dwelling on his past glory as a prize-winning author, Ryota wastes the money he makes as a private detective on gambling and can barely pay child support. After the death of his father, his aging mother and beautiful ex-wife seem to be moving on with their lives. Renewing contact with his initially distrusting family, Ryota struggles to take back control of his existence and to find a lasting place in the life of his young son.

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...

In Kore-eda'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.

Leading attorney Shigemori takes on the defense of murder-robbery suspect Misumi who served jail time for another murder 30 years ago. Shigemori's chances of winning the case seem low; his client freely admits his guilt, despite facing the death penalty if he is convicted. As he digs deeper into the case, as he hears the testimonies of the victim's family and Misumi himself, the once confident Shigemori begins to doubt whether his client is the murderer...

"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...