Dreams

Dreams is a 1990 anthology film made of eight separate episodes, all drawn from the actual dreams of director Akira Kurosawa. The segments range across a lifetime and share a single figure, identified as "I," seen first as a boy and later as an adult. A child watches a procession of foxes in a forest; the same boy learns that a celebration among peach trees can no longer take place because the orchard has been cut down. Elsewhere, travelers struggle through a blizzard, a soldier is confronted in a tunnel, and a man who admires Vincent van Gogh's paintings imagines meeting the artist himself. Nuclear disaster and a peaceful village of water mills also figure among the episodes, which move between childhood memory, art, mortality and the relationship between people and the natural world.

Kurosawa directed the film, his twenty-first of twenty-three, arriving after Ran and before Rhapsody in August. He wrote the screenplay with Ishirō Honda, and the cast includes Akira Terao as the adult "I," Mitsuko Baisho as his mother, Mieko Harada and Mitsunori Isaki. With 130 credited crew members and a budget of 12 million dollars, the production was substantial, while its worldwide box office of about 2 million dollars fell well short of that outlay. On IMDb it holds 7.7 from roughly 32,000 votes, and on TMDB also 7.7, from around 600 votes, indicating a durable reputation among viewers despite its commercial performance.