[Our thanks to Andrew David Long for the following review.]

An eco-terrorist bomb-maker is targeting factories in Tokyo, and only trench-coat-clad Detective Terayama can find and stop him.
 
The real marvel of Tsuta Tetsuichiro's first feature, Island of Dreams, rests not in the struggle to get it made, but simply in how it was made.  Shot in black and white on 16mm stock and blown up to cinemascope, Tetsuichiro and cinematographer Aoki Yutaka (also guiding the lens for another film at the Vancouver International Film Festival: Mariko Tetsuya's feature debut, Yellow Kid) have managed to substantially reproduce the tone of 1950s and '60s noir-influenced Japanese studio pics, including employing some in-camera effects and rear projection backdrops.  They also personally developed and processed the footage.  Tetsuichiro (who wrote the script with a keen sense of period formula and character) then edited on film, using video only once full scenes were assembled and scanned so that he could easily review to decide on further edits.  The man even cut his own negative! Though set in the present day - with modern automobiles and a detective whose learning curve is expedited a little by Google - it's a very loving and respectful nod to a vibrant era of popular Japanese cinema.  Now for all you Nikkatsu-loving cinephiles and curious filmmakers who are drooling at the notion of a hand-processed feature (there's a title card apologizing for the any imperfections resulting from what is actually one of the film's great virtues) with all that lovely grain and a 'scope ratio here's the sad and brutal truth: subtitles on celluloid are very, very expensive for a low budget film; unless you're in Japan, you're almost certainly going to be watching Island of Dreams from tape (probably DVCAM as in Vancouver) or DVD.  In some of the night shoots you can sense how bloody marvelous the texture could be, and especially in a few of the early scenes shot in full daylight, the limitations of the tape format are a disappointment. Even though my Japanese is severely limited (I can explain that my wife is vegetarian and I can ask for shampoo) somewhere there's a print of this film, and that's how I'd want to remember it.
 
Projection format aside, Island of Dreams - named after an actual, enormous refuse site where it is rumoured one can find anything and everything - is true to its influences: the characters are clear, the story progresses with a few helpful coincidences to its necessary end, and the film's moral statement is obvious.  Tetsuichiro chose in part to borrow from this era of filmmaking because he felt that stating a moral position outright in a film of the period he draws from does not feel as out of place as doing so in today's popular films; though the obviousness of the sentiment is reminiscent of a more naïve period, it is not abrasive. By and large he's proved himself right.   
 
Alan is a foreigner of Indian descent whose gentle nature is supremely offended by the wasteful behaviours and environmental destruction of modern Japan, represented by the serious asthma of his young friend Haruna, and also on display in some stark footage of the actual Island of Dreams.  He believes that bombs can bring awareness and change.  Deliberate or not, the early shots of Alan meditating in a mirror image of a carved Buddha, paired with his later condemnation of humanity, and the fact that he is a true outsider in Japanese society conspire to give a slight suggestion that he may be a deity incarnate who believes humanity has gone astray and deserves destruction - a disconcerting undercurrent in what is mostly a conventional detective drama.  Throw in a car chase, some gunplay, and a clever detective trick here and there, and Island of Dreams proves that not everything old should be thrown away. 
 
Now if I could just see the damn print...

Review by Andrew David Long