Dreams

Dreams is a film featuring several short stories that are based on actual dreams dreamt by the director Akira Kurosawa. Some dreams are extremely dark, while others are quite mischievous. There are eight dreams and we watched seven of them: Sunshine Through the Rain, the Peach Orchard, the Tunnel, Crows, Mount Fiji in Red, the Weeping Demon and the Village of Watermills. Each dream has a somewhat “Aesop Fable” motif.

Sunshine Through the Rain and the Peach Orchard focus on the inexperienced minds of the young and the consequences of their exploratory nature. In the Tunnel, the sole survivor of a brigade of soldiers meets his dead comrades at the opening of a tunnel years after their death. The Tunnel represents a black hole of emotions and feelings. The dead soldiers have seeped out of this cavern of sentiment and now the platoon leader must confront his fallen allies; his guilt. Crows is about a painter who is given the opportunity to follow Vincent Van Gogh through a multitude of his paintings as he paints them. Van Gogh lets him in on some personal details regarding his passion for painting

Mount Fiji in Red, the Weeping Demon, and the Village of Watermills were all “Go Green” and environmentally oriented. Flowers are “crippled” in The Weeping Demon; the epitome of beauty when it comes to nature. The Village of Watermills depicts a tale of a young man making his way into a utopian village where modern technology is prohibited and believed to pollute the environment. They have chosen wellbeing over expediency.

I thought each film was very well done cinematography wise and definitely got their messages across without being too preachy. They were highly entertaining and relied more on visual story telling than dialogue. The films were subtitled and little reading had to be done. The atmospheres in each in film were of a wide variety and individualistic.