It’s a Dream (2007)

Dir. Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 22 mins.

In 2007, the Cannes Film Festival invited Tsai Ming-liang and more than 30 other directors to make three-minute films about the experience of going to the movies. Tsai responded with It’s a Dream, drawing on memories of the cinemas he attended as a child in Malaysia. He later expanded the short into a longer work for the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, transforming it from a film made for theatrical presentation into a museum installation.

For Tsai, movie theaters in childhood were almost like temples, places defined by ritual, repetition, and communal experience. Set in a worn, nearly empty cinema, It’s a Dream evokes that atmosphere through rows of red seats, drifting light, music, food, and small gestures among its occupants. Featuring members of Tsai’s own family as well as his longtime actor Lee Kang-sheng, the work treats moviegoing as an experience shaped as much by memory, place, and the presence of others as by what appears on the screen.