Astral City: A Spiritual Journey

Doctor Andre Luiz dies, and it takes him a while to realise it. After a long spell in a dark intermediate zone he is admitted to Nosso Lar, an ordered colony of the afterlife built like a city. There he works, studies and watches the family he left behind. Wagner de Assis directed, from the book the Brazilian medium Chico Xavier published in 1944 and said had been dictated to him by spirits. The film was a major event in Brazil. Spiritism has a wide following there and the production brought that audience straight into cinemas; it was among the most expensive Brazilian films of its time and did large business. The design builds the afterlife as a city: hospitals, ministries, registry offices. That bureaucratic hereafter is its most original element. The telling is openly didactic; the film does not open the belief to argument, it transmits it. Who it is for: viewers curious about spiritist literature and Brazilian popular cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting distance; the film believes its source entirely.