Trinh T. Minh-ha, the filmmaker, theorist, and composer behind such key experimental works of the past fifteen years as Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love, and collaborator Jean-Paul Bourdier, both UC Berkeley professors, present this new work, based on Kenji Miyazawa's novel Milky Way Railroad. A story of friendship and death, Night Passage revolves around the spiritual journey of a young woman, her best friend, and a little boy into a world of rich in-between realities. Their going into the land of “awakened dream” is experienced as a passage of appearances, from a death to a return in life, occurring during a long ride on a night train. Playing with the space of two-dimensional spectacle, the film unfolds in the rhythm of train-window images, with each moment at once familiar and strange. While reminiscent of the experimental narrative video art movement of the 1980s, Night Passage also documents the present-day Bay Area cultural setting, as the film's striking tableaux are designed with the collaboration of contemporary artists including dancer Leigh Evans, musician Greg Goodman, and sculptor Joe Slusky.