Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Still Walking was the second or third film by the Japanese director that I watched, after After Life and probably Nobody Knows. In some ways, I now recognise it as a more typical film for Kore-eda than After Life, in terms of its themes and character constellations. Where the earlier film undoubtedly has the feel and emotional heft that I’ve come to recognise as typical of a Kore-eda film, it is much more high-concept in terms of its premise and plot. More than that, though, when I think of Kore-eda, it‘s his families, both biological and found, that come to mind, and where family isn‘t as obviously a theme of After Life, Still Walking is very much about this: the families we find ourselves saddled with, the ones we make for ourselves.

But family isn‘t just about the people we have in our lives, it is also about those we have lost. Still Walking is focused on a theme that is central to many of the director‘s films: considering the kindness and warmth that are perhaps the most apparent characteristic of Kore-eda‘s films at a first glance, it is striking how many of them are in no small part about death.