Directed and written by Kaizô Hayashi - who in addition to films like Zipang, The Most Terrible Time In My Life and The Stairway to the Distant Past owns Bar Tantei, a detective themed bar in Kyoto, Japan - To Sleep as to Dream is the story of two private detectives searching for an actress who has been trapped within the reel of a silent ninja film.

Private eye Uotsuka (Shiro Sano, Shin Godzilla) and his sidekick Kobayashi (Koji Otake) have been hired by Madame Cherryblossom (Fujiko Fukamizu) to find her missing daughter Bellflower (Moe Kamura, who also composed music for this movie),which leads them to a film studio and a vision of a samurai movie with no ending, a series of actors from Japan's movie past and sets by Takeo Kimura, the art designer of movies like Tokyo: The Last War, A Killer Without a Grave and many more, as well as being the oldest person to ever direct a movie, 2008's Dreaming Awake at the age of 90.

A near-silent film with often only music and commentary by a benshi performer, someone who would narrate silent films for the audience, all to tell the story of a world where detectives and magicians attempt to rescue or restrain Bellflower. The M. Pathé and Company villains are obsessed with film - and aren't we, too? - through a film that I was certain did come from Japan's past long before 1986.

Madame Cherryblossom keeps watching a movie with no ending, either in her memory or reality and like much of Japan's silent film past, it may have been lost to age or warfare. The film that emerges casts her missing daughter as the goal for our hero, but can real life be a love story?

I'd never heard of this film and it just hit me perfectly. Be sure to seek it out and do the same for yourself.

This is the most impossibly beautiful film I've ever seen, a mediation on loss, longing, beauty and time. Using old film techniques, humor, Dadaism, and glorious black and white cinematography, it is also a fanciful homage to early silent cinema in Japan. Especially the Benshi, the silent film narrators. This was a tradition in Russia and Poland as well, a narrator or actor would read the inter-titles of a silent film, adding commentary and at times their own political bent to a feature. This was popular throughout silent cinema's reign, and particularly relevant in industrial or agrarian communities with lower literacy rates. Shunsui Matsuda, a Benshi who traveled throughout coal mining regions of post-war Japan where shortages made re-runs of silent films popular entertainment, appears in Hayashi's film. (Mr. Matsuda is also to be lauded for his work preserving old films, many prints he acquired by searching in thrift shops and restoring them. His excellent book, "The Benshi: Japanese Silent Film Narrators", details both his work and the Benshi tradition.) In many ways comparable to Mohsen Makhmalbaf's "Once Upon a Time Cinema", though without the political commentary, Hayashi's work creates a complete magical world combining both the past and the present. Now if only I could get a copy on DVD.