Andy Lo's Happiness (2016, Hong Kong) begins with images of death. The film opens, in stark black-and-white cinematography, with Kai-yuk sat with his mother's urn by his side as he decides to move from Guangzhou to Hong Kong to reconnect with his estranged father. Kai-yuk's journey to Hong Kong is cross-cut with Aunty Fanny alone in her flat. She walks to the mirror about to tie her hair and discovers, as if for the first time, prominent strands of grey hair on her head. She looks at herself in the mirror, pauses and observes other bits of her face, and leaves. In the next moment, Aunty Fanny is sat in a chair staring into space whilst holding a cigarette – just as she is about to have a drag, she realises that she has left the cigarette for too long, that it is dying, and that she has to extinguish it. Seen together, Aunty Fanny's discovery of her grey hair in the mirror, and therefore her older age, is gently reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's much noted repulsion of her own image in the mirror for it reminded her of death and decay (de Beauvoir 1968; 1996). After the opening sequences that are haunted by the spectre of death, colour returns to the film and, through a series of events, Kai-yuk ends up staying with Aunty Fanny, who is then diagnosed with dementia. As complete strangers with no prior understanding of each other's backstories, Kai-yuk and Aunty Fanny start to depend on and support each other, coming to realise that there will be moments of each other's lives that the other will not quite understand.

Not dissimilar to Happiness, Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest (2007, Japan) opens with a montage replete with images of death in a forest that is, by way of contrast, filled with life: an extreme wide angle shot of trees and grass swaying in the wind is juxtaposed with a Buddhist funeral procession that slowly marches across the horizontal axis of the frame; close-up shots of men working together to fell and strip trees so as to make funeral paraphernalia; and sounds of bells and Buddhist prayers that reverberate through the forest are mixed in with the heightened soundscape of wind and wildlife.