I have some incredible news!

I watch a ton of movies. You wouldn’t believe how many movies a single guy with a five-minute commute can see.

I would say my top four movies of all time are probably (in no order):

top 4
top 4

Among them, Sleep Has Her House is by far the most obscure. It’s experimental slow cinema. It’s indescribable, and I find it transcendent. Some reviews of it are here: https://letterboxd.com/film/sleep-has-her-house/.

To me, it reminds me of being at the river at Deadman’s Creek as the sun sets, and times I’ve been in the woods absolutely alone, and God. No people, no narration: just a river, clouds, the close-up of a horse eye, more river, a waterfall.

[screenshots]
[screenshots]

I’ve seen it hundreds of times. I put it on a second display that I have at work often and just let it loop. Nothing else is like it.

It came out in 2017, but it was shown at a few film festivals around the world, and that’s about it. I know it had a special presentation one time in Brazil, and another in Japan, but I’m not even sure if it’s played in North America.

I follow the creator, Scott Barley, on Twitter. While I originally pirated it, when he posted that it was available for $20 on his website at double the resolution that anyone had pirated it at, I wrote to him, gave him the $20, and he sent me a link in a PDF to his Google Drive, which had the larger, better version.

Out of the blue, he posted that he would be doing a special presentation of it with a Q&A in Vancouver, coming up soon—February 6. Not only that: for the first time ever, it would be shown with a live electronic band performing a new soundtrack for it.

I couldn’t believe it and immediately started looking for plane tickets to see it.

I talked to my mom about it. She doesn’t work Fridays and asked if I had any interest in her coming along with me for the weekend, and I thought that would be fun.

My mom and I have never gone on a vacation before. She’s been on a couple with my brother—out to Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. My plan had been to just go, see the movie, sleep in the cheapest hostel in East Hastings for the night, and fly back the next day.

Instead, Mom looked at different packages and worked her magic with Air Miles and got us a nice hotel for two nights in downtown Vancouver, a five-minute drive away from the theatre showing the movie.

I bought the ticket ($33!) for the event before even looking up what the event actually was.

The venue is Russian Hall, which I could only have assumed to be the name of a movie theatre, but it isn’t. It’s a Russian community center. It looks like the old gym in Blackie School with the wooden seated chairs stacked up. I don’t even know how they will show a movie there—a projector on the floor?

I think that’s great. It makes for an even more unique experience.

Russian Hall
Russian Hall

My mom messaged me tonight and asked me to buy a ticket for her. I laughed, because I know the types of movies she likes, and the reactions she’s had when I’ve tried to show her things I enjoy.

Once I played Little Forest, a wonderful Japanese slice-of-life movie about a young woman who moves to the countryside and harvests vegetables from her field and makes nice soups. The idea of there not being a conflict in a movie upset her greatly, and she kept demanding that I turn it off because she couldn’t understand why someone would make a movie like that.

Little Forest
Little Forest

I sent her the trailer to Sleep Has Her House and described the different images and scenes in the movie: how there was no plot, that it was considered a horror movie, that many found it unsettling, and that others found it completely unwatchable.

I told her if she could get through the trailer and still wanted to see it, that I would buy her a ticket.

I sent her the trailer, and she said that she watched it, and since she knew what she was getting into, she could treat it like going to the dentist or a flight (she’s scared of airplane flights). I bought her a ticket. It’ll be unlike anything she’s ever seen, for sure.