THINGS I LIKE

The Japanese don’t say, “have a dream”, but “see a dream”, because what’s the point in having dreams if you’re not going to see them come true?

London, 1992.  Gentle Russian émigré YURI (20) is a midnight shelf stacker; HIKI (19) is an enigmatic Japanese poet.  They meet for the first time and decide to hide in supermarket aisles after hours, entering into a fantasy world where nationality and language don’t matter. Yuri and Hiki spend the night, to the sounds of Hiki’s mix tape, fashioning stories of food, conscription, music, Mafia, history and Chernobyl. And fall under each other’s spell…

Once in the real world Hiki becomes strangely melancholic and, letting go of Yuri’s hand, falls in front of an oncoming train. As she peacefully slips into a coma, Yuri keeps vigil by her hospital bed.  The only thing he can do is repeatedly play her mix tape, labeled ‘Things I Like’, a cacophony of collected sounds from unknown places far away.

But when Hiki’s tape becomes tangled, those sounds are lost forever. Yuri has just twenty days to recreate the sounds that hold the key to Hiki’s will to live. The doctors tell him that after that there is no hope…

Yuri embarks on a journey to Japan and into Hiki’s secret past - and in finding her will to live he starts to feel more alive than he has ever been.  Once he realises he holds the key to Hiki’s future happiness, Yuri becomes convinced of the power of the tape and his recordings penetrate her comatose imaginings.

Through a multi-sensory mix of sounds and images, THINGS I LIKE exposes the universal truth that Love is a universal language.