With the breakup of his Tokyo orchestra, Daigo, a young cellist, decides to return with his adoring wife Mika to his hometown in Japan's far north. Searching for work, he responds to a cryptic classified ad for work in "Departures" only to find out that the position is in the field of "encoffining," the ritual preparation of a corpse before it is placed in a casket for cremation. Daigo gradually takes to the work and finds he has a real talent, but he is too ashamed to tell Mika, leaving him torn between his true calling and his marriage.

Winner of the Academy Award® for best foreign language film this year, Departures achieves a pleasingly droll blend of screwball-like humor with a moving story about reconciliation, acceptance, and finding one's place in the world, enhanced by a richly orchestrated score. By taking us into the uniquely Japanese tradition of the "Nokanshi"-who washes, dresses, and grooms the dead body in front of the deceased's family, helping the living to bid farewell and the dead to move on to the next world-director Yojiro Takita also offers a refreshingly light and life-affirming vision of how we can reconcile ourselves with death and dying.