Afterlife

Every film could be considered an act of reincarnation, or a ghost story, or an artefact that is itself somehow ‘undead’. Every time a film begins a manifestation of the past is reanimated in the present, and moments once registered by a camera are allowed to live again. The French term for a screening, séance, makes manifest such a connection. To go to the cinema is to perform an act of communion in the present with that which has passed. Often this infers spending time with the dead. As J. Hoberman has written of Cocteau’s Orphée: “The movies bring the dead back to life—just so long as we keep our eyes fixed on the screen.”

Few questions can have fed the imagination as persistently as what might exist beyond death. If cinema exists, in some way, beyond life, it also constitutes a medium of singular power for imagining and giving form to the afterlife: it builds spaces, bodies, movements and points of view for it. This programme sets out to reveal the extraordinary diversity of those imaginings — from the mirrors that serve as passageways between worlds in Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950) to the secret garden of Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat, 2009), or the disembodied flying camera of Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009). The afterlife thus ceases to be merely an idea and takes on a form: a liminal space that is not only imagined as a place, but also a form of being that runs through the figures who inhabit, or coexist, alongside it: bodies suspended between life and death, the human and the spectral.

Opening with Orphée and closing with A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946), the programme is bounded by two landmark works of post-Second World War cinema. It is not by chance that both emerged in the wake of so much death and destruction: the ghost of the war lingers in their cinematic shadows. Celebrated equally for their formal innovation and their poetry, both films invent — and invite us to enter — a territory between life and death, at the intersection of reality and fantasy, memory and imagination. Each in its own way, they are also love stories that transcend the worlds of the living and the dead.

The 18 films that make up the “exquisite corpse” of Afterlife span eras, geographies and sensibilities, converging on the persistence of memory, the “limbo” between life and death, and different forms of haunting — intimate, political or collective. The spectre of war also pursues Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) and Our Song to War (Juanita Onzaga, 2018); in the Iran-set Women Without Men, political violence intersects with patriarchal oppression; the legacies of colonial violence appear in the shape of the undead in The Family and the Zombie (Karrabing Film Collective, 2021); and the figurehead of a slave ship, as if a haunted object, watches over the events of I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). To move through this zone between life and death is also to make visible the way the past forever haunts the present. In many of these films, to speak of the afterlife is also to imagine forms of reparation: a space where what was left unfinished can be resolved, where a debt can be repaid, violence redressed, or the scales somehow brought back into balance. That idea finds perhaps its most radical expression in Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindō, 1968), in which the violence suffered by two women in life returns in the form of supernatural revenge.

But death and the beyond do not appear only under the sign of mourning, violence or dread: in Sombra dolorosa (Guy Maddin, 2004), a confrontation with the indomitable Death himself is envisaged as an entertainingly surreal bout of wrestling; An Asian Ghost Story (Bo Wang, 2023) turns to satire and supernatural fabulation to revisit the political ghosts of Asian modernisation; Oh Be a Fine Girl Kiss Me (Alice dos Reis, 2026) follows a soul in transit with wry humour. The programme thus moves between horror, melodrama, contemplation, the essay and comedy, refusing to fix the afterlife within a single genre or point of view.

I Walked With a Zombie will be screened alongside Nosferasta: First Bite (Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, 2021), collapsing the near eight decades between them in order to compare two ways of thinking about the legacies of colonialism and to reconsider the figures of the zombie and the vampire. Jacques Tourneur’s film is also an example of cinema’s capacity to transcend genre through a poetics of atmosphere, deliberate pacing, ambiguity and quietude — qualities that likewise sustain Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee (…), a sublime film whose influence has “haunted” contemporary cinema ever since its 2010 premiere. In giving material form to the transmigration of souls and animist realities, mingling the ethereal with the everyday, its preoccupations find echoes in Flesh and Ghost (Sky Hopinka, 2025), which sets out from a Hočąk myth in which ancestral relations and Indigenous knowledge bind body and spirit together across the successive waves of the cycles of life.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul drew his inspiration from a book written by a Buddhist monk. For Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé found his in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but heads in his own radical direction: a hallucinatory journey through the astral plane that mobilises an exuberant cinematic arsenal to accompany the protagonist’s soul after its death. In Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990), in turn, Hollywood appropriates the supernatural to build an iconic romantic thriller in which a dead man remains on Earth as a ghost and turns to a medium to protect the woman he loves.

If ancestors are a recurring theme throughout this programme, they take a different form in Invention (Courtney Stephens, 2024), a hybrid experimental drama born of the recent loss of the fathers of both the director and the actress Callie Hernandez, which explores the tenuous boundary between reality and fiction, both in family relationships and in “post-truth” America. Cinema, death and memory also run through Last Movies (Stanley Schtinter, 2026), which sets out from the last films seen by famous figures before they died in order to imagine a history of cinema through those final images. In both cases, cinema becomes a kind of memorial, able to outwit death by preserving, reconstructing or sharing what remains of those who have left us.

Fact, fiction and the mutable matter of memory likewise give shape to the extraordinary After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998), in which the recently deceased arrive at a way station between life and death where they are invited to recreate, on film, one essential memory to keep for all eternity. Koreeda recounts that the idea came to him when, still young, one night whilst working in an editing room he imagined what it would be like to watch his own life there after his death. Born of that thought, the film reflects on the role of cinema in the construction and sharing of memories. As the director would later put it: “It is not that I believe in spirits or in a life after death, but I think that feeling the presence of the dead while we are alive is, in fact, necessary if we are to reflect on our own life.” Perhaps it is in that movement, between these states of existence, that these films return us to the present.