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DEPARTURES

ORIGINAL TITLE: OKUTIBITO

By Yojiro TAKITA

Drama - Completed 2008

An emotionally moving drama about a young man who finds life through the death that he encounters.

- Year of production
- 2008
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- JAPAN
- Languages
- JAPANESE
- Duration
- 131 mn
- Director(s)
- Yojiro TAKITA
- Writer(s)
- Kundo KOYAMA
- Cast
- Masahiro MOTOKI, Ryoko HIROSUE, Kimiko YO, Tsutomu YAMAZAKI
- ISAN
- 0000-0002-6C1D-0000-4-0000-0000-P
- EIDR
- 10.5240/CFFF-0964-48D0-CA02-02C9-U
- Producer(s)
- Yasuhiro MASE
- Synopsis
- Departures follows a young man, who has just started working as a “Nokanshi” (Encoffineer). Cleaning up the body, placing the dead into the coffin, and sending the dead to the next world… he is the gatekeeper between life and death.
  The young man is Daigo Kobayashi, who was a cellist in an orchestra which had just been dissolved. Suddenly thrown out onto the streets without a job and no hope for life, Daigo decides to move back to his old hometown, with his wife. However, his life is revived by the job of “encoffineer”. The job is despised by his wife and the people around him, but through the “Deaths” that he encounters, he starts to finally find what “Life” is all about.
  Until our own “departure” comes, we must all eventually “send off” those we love. The universal theme evokes the love between married couples, of parents for children, of children for parents, and the ties that bind relatives, friends, and co-workers, in a film that will raise powerful emotions of both laughter and tears.