Oscar for best foreign language film in 2009 - Departures, by Yojiro Takita is a successful production that was not expected at all: It was a real challenge taking a death theme, says the director. The idea came from the actor Masahiro Motoki, who had assisted, in India, at a ceremony of passage into the beyond.

Motoki, the interpreter of Daigo, is a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and now finds himself jobless. Daigo decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled Departures thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency only to discover that the job is actually for a Nokanshi or encoffineer, a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life.

We cannot say that death is absent from the screens, it would be overrepresented. But it appears as a tragic event: murder, accident, disease - in this way, we can plunge into mourning. Or, we can laugh. But it is rare that the death appears naturally in the character's life, as the end that we all know to be welcomed with dignity, according to the rites of farewell and departure.
Therefore, Departures is a rare film. The meaning of rituals, the precision and elegance of the gestures envelop the brutality of the physical separation between life and death. With Daigo, the viewer discovers a job and learning begins with an unexpected note of humor, linking death and life.
As the experience of Daigo joined his intimate experience, attendance of the death turns its way of being. His wife leaves him, but she will return one day. Loneliness does not frighten him. He wins humble and wise friends and a post-mortem reconciliation with his father, who had abandoned him. A discrete current irrigates melodramatic description of simple and quiet ceremony, avoiding drought.

It's a film about love, says the director. The unconditional love of people who are always there for you, with no questions. The time of death is when you become aware of the real links that unite us to those we lose. It is our responsibility to extend, to remain alive. Nothing was scary, but rather a form of hope. Death enriches life.

Departures revives this forgotten feeling - the piety to death, a place where respect, memories and love lead to.