Dreams

Not only is this my first film of 2025, but this is also my first Akira Kurosawa. I am so pleased to have started Japanuary 2025 with Dreams, it is an absolutely gorgeous film that showcases so much of Kurosawa's vision as a director. The visual poetry was astounding to me and I particularly loved "The Peach Orchard", as I am a sucker for cinema which captures both the spirit of childhood and yearning. I was somewhat surprised at the cogent presence of death throughout. It's treated very differently in the different vignettes, it's almost comical the way the boy's mother in "Sunshine Through the Rain" tells him he must be ready to kill himself, compared with the heaviness of it in "The Tunnel", the inevitability of it in "Mount Fuji in Red", and then the respect, welcoming, and almost reverence of it in "The Village of the Water Mills." Truly I had a wonderful time with this, and I cannot wait to explore Kurosawa's filmography more.