To Sleep So As To Dream
Press Play to start
Polish premiereTheatrical Screenings
Kinoteka 1
Kinoteka 1
Online Availability
Additional Materials
Film description
A former silent film star hires a private detective to find her missing daughter, Bellflower. Accompanied by his clumsy but loyal assistant, Uozuka, the detective follows a trail through the city that frequently defies logic. What begins as a seemingly routine investigation soon transforms into a dreamlike journey, leading ever deeper into a labyrinth from which escape becomes uncertain. Who are the detectives truly searching for?
The nostalgic “To Sleep So as to Dream” is a love letter to old Tokyo, a city frozen in time, shimmering with longing for the past. Kaizō Hayashi deliberately defies contemporary cinematic trends, crafting a film styled after silent cinema and meticulously recreating the atmosphere of the 1920s. It is both a tribute to a tradition brutally interrupted by war and a singular artistic gesture - a refusal to forget. With the detective as a guide through a vanished world, Hayashi reconstructs the lost continuity of cinema. As Aaron Gerow wrote, “Cinema is an attempt to sleep, in order to dream someone else’s dreams.”
text:
Łukasz Mańkowski
Kaizô Hayashi
Kaizō Hayashi is a romantic of Japanese cinema – a director who taught the modern era to dream in images from a century ago. Hayashi is an elegant outsider of Japanese film who, with his debut "To Sleep So as to Dream" (1986), secured his place in history as the creator of one of the most beautiful tributes to silent cinema. This fully auteur, 1920s-stylized film — completely at odds with the aesthetics of the 1980s — became a manifesto of nostalgia and sensitivity, as well as a work of love for the medium itself.
Beyond film, Hayashi built a career in the world of video games, collaborating with Konami as a creative director, where he brought cinematic storytelling and a keen eye for visual detail into interactive narratives. In cinema, his deepest affection has always been for the noir genre — in Japan, he became known as the author of the "Maiku Hama" series.
1986 Chcę spać tak, by śnić / Yume miru yō ni nemuritai / To Sleep So as to Dream
1988 Teito monogatari / Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis
1989 Teito taisen / Tokyo: The Last War
1990 Zipang
1994 Waga jinsei saiaku no toki / The Most Terrible Time in My Life
1995 Haruka na jidai no kaidan o / Stairway to the Distant Past
2020 Bolt
