Afterlife

Throughout history, religions, spiritual traditions, philosophical schools of thought and even science have sought to answer the same question: what happens after physical life ends? Is there a soul, a consciousness or some form of existence that persists beyond death? Death is one of the few universal experiences of the human condition and, at the same time, one of the most mysterious.

Cinema, as an art form of the image and the imagination, has continually explored this mystery. From the earliest ghostly depictions to the most complex contemporary reflections on memory, identity and transcendence, the seventh art has found countless ways to give form to the invisible and to make visible those things that elude human understanding.

Bringing together works from different eras, geographical locations and artistic sensibilities, this programme offers a journey through some of the ways in which cinema has imagined states of existence after death. From past lives to intermediate worlds, via ancestral connections, states of limbo, experiences of mourning and processes of transformation, the selected films converge around themes such as the persistence of memory, the ‘limbo’ between life and death, and the many forms of haunting—intimate, political or collective.

From the poetic visions of filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and Kaneto Shindo, to the contemporary approaches of Hirokazu Koreeda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shirin Neshat and Gaspar Noé, this programme explores different conceptions of the afterlife, showing how cinema continues to reinvent one of humanity’s oldest mysteries. A cinema about life and death, but one that can also be a matter of life and death.

Curated by Justin Jaeckle and Lídia Queirós