5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bangkok Post
TEA Art Weekend to host free screening of Kurosawa's Dreams
This Saturday, cinema lovers have the rare opportunity to step into the vivid, surreal world of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams with a special screening at TEA Art Weekend -- a festival celebrating creativity through art exhibitions, live performances, rare film showings and a Mini Art Fair featuring over 14 booths. The festival runs over two weekends -- this Saturday and Sunday and Aug 23 and 24 -- at TEA Art Hub behind Kingsquare Community and transforms the venue into a dynamic gathering space for artists and audiences alike.
Released in 1990, Dreams is one of the legendary Japanese filmmaker's most personal and visually striking works. Structured as an anthology of eight episodes, each segment is inspired by Kurosawa's own recurring dreams, blending folklore, fantasy and reality into a seamless, poetic tapestry.
The film stars Akira Terao, Chishu Ryu, Mieko Harada and Mitsuko Baisho, and even features Martin Scorsese in a memorable turn as Vincent van Gogh. It was Kurosawa's first film in 45 years for which he wrote the screenplay entirely himself, produced as a Japan–US co-production with support of Warner Bros, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Premiering out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, Dreams has been regarded as a late-career masterpiece, admired for its cinematography, bold use of colour and deeply contemplative tone. Across its eight chapters, Dreams guides the viewer through a wide spectrum of human experiences, from innocent wonder to apocalyptic dread.
"Sunshine Through The Rain" opens with a young boy disobeying his mother to witness a secret fox wedding procession steeped in Japanese myth. "The Peach Orchard" reflects on childhood loss and the fragility of beauty through an encounter with the spirits of felled peach trees. In "The Blizzard", a mountaineering team battles both nature and hallucination in a snowstorm while "The Tunnel" presents a spectral meeting between a former army officer and the ghosts of his dead soldiers.
The film's later segments turn towards humanity's relationship with art and the environment. In "Crows", a painter steps into the swirling canvases of Vincent van Gogh, walking through fields of wheat and over bridges beneath skies alive with movement. "Mount Fuji In Red" and "The Weeping Demon" offer grim visions of a nuclear disaster and its aftermath, warning of mankind's self-destruction. Finally, "Village Of The Watermills" closes the anthology with a serene, almost utopian vision of life in harmony with nature.
