Eiga Sai 2011 - Screening Schedules

For us J-Culture enthusiasts, we know that July is Filipino-Japanese friendship month of course this can only mean.. Eiga Sai's back! Block off July 02-10 guys! This time, they've included the movie “DEPARTURES” I’ve seen this movie and It's highly recommended!

Eiga Sai 2011–Movie Details

DEPARTURES
Trailer
Masahiro Motoki (Daigo Kobayashi), Ryoko Hirosue (Mika Kobayashi), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Shoei Sasaki)

Synopsis:
When the orchestra in which he plays cello disbands, Daigo KOBAYASHI (Masahiro Motoki) abandons a career in music, and moves with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) to his home town in the north-eastern prefecture of Yamagata. He finds a ‘help wanted’ advertisement that seems to offer good terms for work with what he assumes is a travel agency, and goes for an interview in an office with new coffins lining the back wall. The company owner, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), hires him with no more than a glance at Daigo’s résumé, at which point Daigo asks what exactly the company does and is told the work involves the ceremonial ‘encoffinating’ of corpses prior to cremation. He is reluctant, but Sasaki urges him to take the job and he accepts, telling Mika the work involves ‘ceremonies’. In this way he begins to travel around Hirano, in Yamagata, with Sasaki. A beautiful suicide victim who turns out to be a cross-dressing boy; a tearaway teenager dead in a motorcycle accident, an elderly grandmother who admired the baggy white socks favored by her grand-daughters with their high-school uniforms: Daigo encounters death in various forms and, although he is uncertain at first, begins to understand this work of ‘encoffination’ and somehow a respect for life as well. Mika, though, finds out exactly what sort of ‘ceremony’ the work involves. Appalled, she demands that he quit, and when he refuses, leaves for her family home back in Tokyo. He becomes alone again since his mother died several years before and his father having deserted the family when Daigo was a boy, but continues to believe in the value of the work he is doing. As winter turns into spring, he begins to feel confident in himself and his new career, but now a series of significant events take place in close succession: Mika returns, the mother of a close childhood friend suddenly dies, and he receives word that the father he has heard nothing from in 30 years has also passed away. As an encoffineer, as husband, as a son, and as a human being: how will Daigo deal with life and death among the people who are dearest to him? A final departure, to a happy farewell…