[MUSIC] What do the memories that we hold dear tell us about ourselves? Before I continue, try to recall a really happy event in your life. I'll wait a moment for you to remember. Got it? Recalling an especially happy time can affect you emotionally, causing you to smile as you recapture the past. For a moment or so you feel what you felt before based on your episodic memory, your memory of past experiences. To understand the emotional power of these memories, filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda surveyed 500 people and asked them to recall their most cherished memory. Based on their reports, he created After Life, a celestial fantasy of a film involving recently deceased people who get to keep only one special memory from their life. This film is Koreeda's way of showing how these memories help to define our lives. [SOUND] Korreda's film featuring Arata, Erica Oda, and Takashi Naito introduces us to 22 people, some young and some old, who recently died. One by one they arrive at a drab cosmic way station somewhere between Heaven and Earth where they must complete a critical task before continuing on to the afterlife. Case workers assigned to the deceased relay their assignment. You'll be staying with us for one week. While you are here there is one thing you must do. We need you to select the one memory, one memory that was most meaningful or precious to you. The deceased have three days to select the single memory that they will keep for eternity. All other memories will be lost. Once a memory is selected, the caseworkers film a recreation of the event and show it to the deceased thereby mimicking how our memories are interpretations of past experiences, not exact replicas of those events. Departing with that recreated memory, the deceased will re-experience it forever. Surprisingly the selected memories are often brief snippets of time evoking subtle pleasurable sensations. A former pilot remembers flying through wispy clouds. An elderly woman recalls cherry blossoms falling around her. For some however, recalling happiness is no easy task. Failing to find a happy memory, elderly Ichiro Watanabe looks back on his dull life with regret. Only after reviewing his lifetime videos does he finally settle for an uneventful memory, one of him with his wife Kyoko. But for his youthful case worker, Mochizuki, this is an eye opening moment. Kyoko was the woman Mochizuki was engaged to marry before he was killed in the Pacific War. Unable to find a happy memory of his own, Mochizuki became a case worker, stuck in the way station for years. It is only when a fellow case worker shows him the favorite memory of Ichiro's deceased wife Kyoko saying, she chose this moment that he experiences joy. Looking on, Mochizuki sees that Kyoko's happiest memory shows her sitting on a park bench with him, a young naval officer in 1943. Acknowledging this discovery as his happiest moment, Mochizuki is now prepared to move on adding, I search desperately inside myself for any memory of happiness. Now, 50 years later, I've learned I was part of someone else's happiness. What a wonderful discovery. Given the same task as the characters in After Life, which single memory do you treasure most and want to maintain forever? For filmmaker Koreeda, memories give our life meaning, and Heaven is our most cherished memory. [MUSIC]