Leap of Faith. IV. Afterlife in Images

Join us on Tuesday, July 28 at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for Afterlife in Images, the fourth and the last part of the screening series Leap of Faith, bringing together artists’ films and cinema features from Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Vietnam, Japan, and the United States.

Modern life was supposed to make the world more rational and easier to explain. Yet many experiences resist rational explanation: an illness without a clear cause, an ethical demand that changes a life, the presence of the dead, an image that outlives what it records. The films in this program engage with experiences that transcend what exists within the concrete, physical world. To take a leap of faith, here, is to act on the chance that this world holds more than it shows.

Screenings take place on Tuesdays, July 7–28, 2026, and begin after sunset. Read more about the series here.

IV. Afterlife in Images
Tuesday, July 28, 2026, after sunset
What happens after we die? These films approach the question through technologies of recording and simulation. Memories are recreated and projected onto a screen; digital replicas outlive the objects they once represented. The wager here is whether an image still holds something of a life once the body and the world around it have disappeared.

Coleman Collins, Specular Fiction (2024, US, 8 minutes)
In an imagined future of indeterminate distance, the objects of the world have been destroyed, leaving behind only the mirror-world of their digital replicas.

Hirokazu Kore-eda, After Life (1998, Japan, 119 minutes)
In After Life, the recently dead arrive in a limbo-like institution where they must choose one memory from life to carry into eternity. A small staff then recreates each selected memory on film. Kore-eda’s premise transforms cinema into an afterlife machine, one based less on preservation or mimesis than on creative projection.

For more information, contact [email protected].
In case of rain, the event will take place in our indoor Screening Room.

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores notions of diaspora in relation to technological methods of transmission, translation, copying, and reiteration. His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. Collins is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at e-flux, New York; Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles; Herald Street, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem/Ramallah; Larder, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Brief Histories, New York; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. He began his career in television and has since directed more than a dozen feature films, including Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), and After the Storm (2016). He won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Like Father, Like Son and won the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters.