A dreamland. This is how the director, Raphaël Matthieu, refers to Japan, and to a notable wonderland, the movies. It is on that basis that Matthieu puts his film together, a confabulation which uses seemingly documental footage. Taken out of context, by virtue of editing, the images are there to serve the purely fictional screenplay that revolves around a single event: the suicide of a man, Christophe Turin, a French Literature professor who is living in Tokyo. In a diary writing style, the narrator's voice-over meditates upon the friend's suicide, simultaneously recalling him and invoking the unique relationship that the Japanese culture has established with death. The filmmaker re-edits these images thereby drawing up a narrative, but preserves the time gap, that is to say, its old-age quality. The chronological time of the speech and recollection it's the present, in which the storytelling takes place; on the other hand; the time of the images refers to what is gone, documented in every single image. Therefore, in “Dreamland” the images are vital and alive, whereas death is felt out. (AJM)