Transcending Dimensions

Ticket holders are invited to the Furman Gallery for Matsuri to Midnight before the screening starts.

Reaffirming his status as one of Japan’s most daring cinema provocateurs, NYAFF 2025 Filmmaker in Focus Toshiaki Toyoda (Blue Spring, 9 Souls) returns with his first feature in seven years. A pulsing flirtation with the surreal, and an enthralling masterwork exploding with visceral and cerebral delights, Transcending Dimensions fuses sci-fi and crime into a meditation on the very nature of existence, time, and belief. Blending concepts he’s been exploring in his brilliant “Mt. Resurrection Wolf” series of shorts, Toyoda immerses viewers in an aesthetically transfixing vision of inner and outer worlds. Set against a backdrop of collapsing realities and cosmic uncertainty, his new film delivers an epic journey involving four men: an earnest hit man (frequent collaborator Ryuhei Matsuda), a gullible monk, a mountain mystic, and a powerful sorcerer. Soon, faux religions, yakuza-style violence, and environmental collapse threaten to collide.