"Children at the rooftop cinema": dream and reality
- Ciclos shorts fest
- hace 4 días
- 2 Min. de lectura
"Children at the rooftop cinema". Yuuki Suriba. (Japan, 2025)
On a rooftop, a group of children sits waiting in old cinema seats. Their rain boots rest in shallow puddles. Soon, a girl appears carrying an antique projector and reels of Refcy film, a format that has been obsolete since 1938. This everyday yet unusual setting opens Children at the Rooftop Cinema (Japan, 2025), a short film in which every frame seems to be shaped from the substance of dreams.
As the screening begins, the children are drawn into the strange worlds unfolding on the screen: forests where trees have been replaced by traffic signs, urban tunnels that lead unexpectedly into nature. We encounter unsettling figures moving between wakefulness and sleep, characters emerging from the darkness of a tunnel into the light of the woods.
Each sequence evokes the idea of passage: to leave, to emerge, to cross through. The cinematography maintains a restrained, almost translucent tone, while subtle blurs heighten the dreamlike texture. The music, marked by a minimalist brightness, delicately accompanies these shifts between the real and the symbolic.
Meanwhile, the children, the innocent and delighted audience of this improvised rooftop theater, respond to these visions with applause and quiet awe. Children at the Rooftop Cinema stands as a tribute to cinema and a celebration of art’s power to move and astonish us. Yet it is also a short film filled with questions. What is the nature of reality? What does death look like? One question lingers with particular insistence: what does it mean to be reborn? Perhaps rebirth is leaving the tunnel, stepping out of the underground metro, changing landscapes, or simply sitting on a rooftop to watch a film together, allowing oneself to be carried by that shared dream that lets us die and be reborn within just a few minutes of footage.
Ciclos Shorts Fest
2026
TRAILER
Yuuki Suriba
The director has received several awards in short film and screenwriting competitions and is currently working in audiovisual creation.
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