Departures 2008 Film full HD movie download free with screenpaly story, dialogue LYRICS and STAR Cast

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) loses his job as a cellist when his orchestra is disbanded. He and his wife Mika (Ry?ko Hirosue) move from Tokyo to his hometown in Yamagata, where they live in his childhood home that was left to him when his mother died two years earlier. It is fronted by a coffee shop that Daigo's father had operated before he ran off with a waitress when Daigo was six; since then the two have had no contact. Daigo feels hatred towards his father and guilt for not taking better care of his mother. He still keeps a "stone-letter"—a stone which is said to convey meaning through its texture—which his father had given him many years before.

Daigo finds an advertisement for a job "assisting departures". Assuming it to be a job in a travel agency, he goes to the interview at the NK Agent office and learns from the secretary, Yuriko Kamimura (Kimiko Yo), that he will be preparing bodies for cremation in a ceremony known as encoffinment. Though reluctant, Daigo is hired on the spot and receives a cash advance from his new boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki). Daigo is furtive about his duties and hides the true nature of the job from Mika.

His first assignment is to assist with the encoffinment of a woman who died at home and remained undiscovered for two weeks. He is beset with nausea and later humiliated when strangers on a bus detect an unsavoury scent on him. To clean himself, he visits a public bath which he had frequented as a child. It is owned by Tsuyako Yamashita (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), the mother of one of Daigo's former classmates.

Over time, Daigo becomes comfortable with his profession as he completes a number of assignments and experiences the gratitude of the families of the deceased. Though he faces social ostracism, Daigo refuses to quit, even after Mika discovers a training DVD in which he plays a corpse and leaves him to return to her parents' home in Tokyo. Daigo's former classmate Yamashita (Tetta Sugimoto) insists that the mortician find a more respectable line of work and, until then, avoids him and his family.

After a few months, Mika returns and announces that she is pregnant. She expresses hope that Daigo will find a job of which their child can be proud. During the ensuing argument, Daigo receives a call for an encoffinment for Mrs Yamashita. Daigo prepares her body in front of both the Yamashita family and Mika, who had known the public bath owner. The ritual earns him the respect of all present, and Mika stops insisting that Daigo change jobs.

Sometime later, they learn of the death of Daigo's father. A reluctant Daigo goes with Mika to another village to see the body. Daigo is at first unable to recognize him, but takes offence when local funeral workers are careless with the body. He insists on dressing it himself, and while doing so finds a stone-letter which he had given to his father, held tight in the dead man's hands. The childhood memory of his father's face returns to him, and after he finishes the ceremony, Daigo gently presses the stone-letter to Mika's pregnant belly.

Cultural background

Japanese funerals are highly ritualized affairs which are generally—though not always—conducted in accordance with Buddhist rites. In preparation for the funeral, the body is washed and the orifices are blocked with cotton or gauze. The encoffining ritual (called n?kan), as depicted in Departures, is rarely performed, and even then only in rural areas. This ceremony is not standardized, but generally involves professional morticians (???, n?kanshi) ritually preparing the body, dressing the dead in white, and sometimes applying make-up. The body is then put on dry ice in a casket, along with personal possessions and items necessary for the trip to the afterlife.

Despite the importance of death rituals, in traditional Japanese culture the subject is considered unclean as everything related to death is thought to be a source of kegare (defilement). After coming into contact with the dead, individuals must cleanse themselves through purifying rituals. People who work closely with the dead, such as morticians, are thus considered unclean, and during the feudal era those whose work was related to death became burakumin (untouchables), forced to live in their own hamlets and discriminated against by wider society. Despite a cultural shift since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the stigma of death still has considerable force within Japanese society, and discrimination against the untouchables has continued.

Until 1972, most deaths were dealt with by families, funeral homes, or n?kanshi. As of 2014, about 80% of deaths occur in hospitals, and preparation of the bodies is frequently done by hospital staff; in such cases, the family often does not see the body until the funeral. A 1998 survey found that 29.5% of the Japanese population believed in an afterlife, and a further 40% wanted to believe; belief was highest among the young. Belief in the existence of a soul (54%) and a connection between the worlds of the living and the dead (64.9%) was likewise common.

Conception and preproduction

In the early 1990s, a 27-year-old Motoki and his friend travelled to India; just before going, at the friend's recommendation he read Shin'ya Fujiwara's Memento Mori (Latin for "remember that you will die"). While in India, he visited Varanasi, where he saw a ceremony in which the dead were cremated and their ashes floated down the Ganges. Witnessing this ceremony of death against a backdrop of bustling crowds going about their lives deeply affected Motoki. When he returned to Japan, he read numerous books on the subject of death, and in 1993 wrote a book on the relationship between life and death: Tenkuu Seiza—Hill Heaven. Among the books he read was Shinmon Aoki's autobiographical Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician (?????, N?kanfu Nikki), which exposed Motoki to the world of the n?kanshi for the first time. Motoki said he found a sense of mystery and near-eroticism to the profession that he felt had an affinity with the film world.

Getting funding for the project was difficult because of the taboos against death, and the crew had to approach several companies before Departures was approved by Toshiaki Nakazawa and Yasuhiro Mase. According to the film's director, Y?jir? Takita, a consideration in taking on the film was the age of the crew: "we got to a certain point in our lives when death was creeping up to become a factor around us". Kund? Koyama was enlisted to provide the script, his first for a feature film; his previous experience had been in scripting for television and stage. Takita, who had begun his career in the pink film genre before entering mainstream filmmaking in 1986 with Comic Magazine, took on the director's role in 2006, after producer Toshiaki Nakazawa presented him with the first draft of the script. In a later interview he stated "I wanted to make a film from the perspective of a person who deals with something so universal and yet is looked down upon, and even discriminated against". Although he knew of the encoffining ceremony, he had never seen one performed.

Production of Departures took ten years, and the work was ultimately only loosely adapted from Coffinman; later revisions of the script were worked on collaboratively by the cast and crew. Although the religious aspects of funerals were important in the source work, the film did not include them. This, together with the fact that filming was completed in Yamagata and not Aoki's home prefecture of Toyama, led to tensions between the production staff and the author. Aoki expressed concern that the film was unable to address "the ultimate fate of the dead". The first edition of the book was broken into three parts; the third, "Light and Life", was an essay-like Buddhist musing on life and death, regarding the "light" seen when one perceived the integration of life and death, that is absent from the film. Aoki believed the film's humanistic approach did away with the religious aspects that were central to the book—the emphasis on maintaining connections between the living and the dead that he felt only religion could provide—and refused to allow his name and that of his book to be used. For the new title, Koyama coined the term okuribito as a euphemism for n?kanshi, derived from the words okuru ("to send off") and hito ("person").

While the book and film share the same premise, the details differ considerably; Aoki attributed these changes to the studio making the story more commercial. Both feature a protagonist who endures uneasiness and prejudice because of his job as a n?kanshi, undergoes personal growth as a result of his experiences, and finds new meaning in life when confronted with death. In both, the main character deals with societal prejudices and misunderstandings over his profession. In Coffinman, the protagonist was the owner of a pub-café that had gone out of business; during a domestic squabble his wife threw a newspaper at him, in which he found an ad for the n?kanshi position.^<