ZAMEK Culture Centre

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.”

TO SLEEP AS TO DREAM, dir. Kaizô Hayashi, Japan 1986, 81’