Barbican screens Paprika on 29th March 2017

Do you want an excuse to see one of the late Satoshi Kon's great movies on the big screen? Well, London's Barbican is willing to give you one later this year, as they'll be screening Paprika in late March.

The screening takes place on Wednesday, 29th March 2017 at 8:30PM, and screens in Cinema 3 alongside 1960s American live-action short The Secret Cinema under the title What the Movies Do to Us: Paprika. Here's the blurb for the screening:

Federico Fellini once called the movies “a dream we dream with our eyes open.” Many, like him, have noted how watching a film is like having a dream. The viewing conditions in the cinema, alone in the dark, recall our solitary existence as dreamers in the night. . Films seem “real” the way dreams do; their images may overpower and sometimes frighten. We’re familiar with this film-dream analogy too – we commonly describe Hollywood as “the Dream Factory.” 

This brilliant, unsettling Japanese sci-fi animation – the inspiration for the Christopher Nolan mind-bender Inception (2010) – plays with all of these interlocking ideas about films and dreams. Its complex plot concerns a new invention, the DC Mini, which allows psychotherapists to enter a patient's dreams and explore their unconscious. 

When one falls into the clutches of an evil cabal, they use it to create a mass nightmare. Enter Atsuko Chiba – a talented psychotherapist who uses her alter-ego, “dream detective” Paprika to intervene. The film, along with Paprika, hops in and out of reality and fantasy; many sequences resolve into images on a movie screen with the dreamer in the audience. 

Tickets are now on general sale for the screening, and you can book tickets or find more information on the Barbican web site.