Saturday, 7 November 2026 at 9 pm
Yume
Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Japan, USA, 1990, Colour, 119'
A cycle of eight vignettes, for which the author found inspiration in eight dreams he had during different periods of his life, begins with the story of young I, a boy who, despite his mother's warning, decides to watch the forest “wedding” of a pair of foxes. In the second vignette, I speaks with the spirits of peach trees that have been mercilessly felled by humans. The third vignette depicts a dream about a group of mountaineers trying to return to the camp they set out from in the middle of a great snowstorm.
In the fourth segment of I, we find him as a man who, in an abandoned tunnel, meets the soldier responsible for the deaths of his comrades. In the fifth vignette, we follow an art student who meets Vincent van Gogh and enters the world of his paintings. The sixth vignette is a nightmare about a nuclear catastrophe threatening Japan, and the seventh is also a nightmare in which we encounter the world after a nuclear cataclysm inhabited by mutants. The eighth segment shows the author himself meeting a 103-year-old man in a utopian village.
In the 1991 fantasy omnibus drama, nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, the then 80-year-old screenwriter and director Akira Kurosawa, with uncredited directorial collaboration from Ishirô Honda, director of the Japanese Godzilla series, with whom he had collaborated on the film Ran, decided to visualise the dreams that, in his own words, often returned to him. These dreams are arranged chronologically according to the ages of life, and are subject to different interpretations depending on the viewer's sensibilities and life experiences, It is a qualitatively uneven and not entirely coherent whole, whose segments are linked by a theme of a certain degree of human inferiority in relation to space, time and the phenomena that surround him.
Since these are dreams, the characters in the film move along the paths of their own subconscious and, unable to find their bearings, marvel at certain phenomena, wander, flee, hide and fight. Meanwhile, constantly finding themselves in new and unfamiliar surroundings, they are in subordinate positions which Kurosawa brilliantly illustrates through the dominant use of medium and long shots, with rare interiors and individuals as tiny parts of monumental scenes. Kurosawa stylistically and in his overall approach follows the classic narrative film, without avant-garde deviations, and features a dynamic camera and mise-en-scène. In the fifth vignette, the renowned director Martin Scorsese appears in the role of Vincent van Gogh.
Tickets for the screening on 7 November 2026 at 9 pm can be purchased online HERE, as well as at the Surogatkino KIC box office one hour before the start.