This program gathers films that approach dreaming and imagination as political, psychic, and cinematic spaces. Moving between personal reverie, archival excavation, speculative futures and states of loss and desire, the works trace how inner worlds are shaped and threatened by systems of power, memory, and control. Through fragmented narratives, reenactments, and sensorial experiments, dreams emerge as porous sites of resistance and intimacy, where private experience seeps into collective histories and imagined futures. The acts of dreaming and re-imagining stories become a subtle, radical revolt. Oscillating between reverie and rupture, the works invite us to linger in the unstable space between waking life and what cannot be fully recalled, owned, or controlled.
In the presence of Kersti Jan Werdal, Sofia Theodore-Pierce, Gala Hernández López
Curated by Eva Giolo
In collaboration with Elephy
In I Cannot Now Recall, Kersti Jan Werdal presents a collection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, selected by the filmmaker from Rainer’s journals. Through choice and abstraction, Werdal produces a shared psychic landscape that is as expansive as it is anxious.
A woman talks to us from inside a machine that records her brain activity. She describes a mental labyrinth composed of an old amusement park called Dreamland, 19th-century dream photography, contemporary experiments in mental decoding using Al, and Prophetic, a start-up whose goal is to control dreams. But what do our dreams see when they look at us? like moths to light is a meditation on the future of our dream worlds in the age of neurocapitalism.
Delving into the enigmatic relationship between consciousness and the sleeping body, Ebony Dream explores the idea that while we rest our minds slip into a realm beyond deliberate awareness and our bodies continue to act. It invites the viewer to consider what it truly means to be awake, asleep, and in-between.
Seizure dreams, horses, and long-distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras’s Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring the filmmaker’s mother and other star-crossed lovers.
Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss.
Daria has written her first manuscript about falling in love with a mysterious girl called Abi (blue). The night flowers in her garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes.
