Support

Celebrate SFF's 70th birthday with a gift towards its future. Your donation will help us inspire the next generation of filmmakers and filmgoers.

Learn how you can help

Become a Director's Patron

Support

Keep TFF Alive: Your donation will ensure the Travelling Film Festival can return to play a vital role in the recovery of our community and our local film industry.

Learn how you can help

Become a Director's Patron

Play Trailer

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Directed by Pierre Földes

2022

France

108 minutes

Unclassified 15+

Book Tickets

Haruki Murakami’s short stories come to life in this fantastical animation about a giant talkative frog, a lost cat, an existential banker and more peculiar characters in Tokyo.

It is 2011 and the city has been struck by a tragic earthquake and tsunami. Anxious banker, Katagiri, is enlisted by a gregarious humanoid frog to slay a giant angry worm that is hell-bent on wreaking more havoc. Meanwhile, apathetic Komura is on a mission to hand-deliver a mysterious package, while also undergoing a divorce and losing his job. In a series of enigmatic vignettes, we follow surreal tales where dreams and reality playfully blur into one. Director Pierre Földes’s musing, pastel-rich debut stands strong against other recent award-winning Murakami adaptations like Burning (SFF 2018) and Drive My Car (SFF 2021).

An impressive achievement, a piece of storytelling which balances moments of flighty whimsy against deeper existential questions, marking Földes as a talent to watch in the world of adult-skewed animation.

Wendy Ide, Screen International

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian