There’s a second early in Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming the place a horse drinks from a pond, its muzzle haloed by glimmering sundown mild. Slowly, the horse comes into focus. Then, simply as slowly, the person watching it does too. This affected person unraveling of element, this meditative unfurling of notion, establishes the movie’s aesthetic philosophy. We’re not merely observing; we’re getting into a liminal area, a world the place historical past breathes within the current, the place reminiscence lingers not as recollection however as lived expertise.
When a well-digger is mistaken for an enemy and executed in post-war Armenia, his household shields the reality from his daughter, Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan). To maintain her away from the unfolding grief, they enlist disaffected soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan) to escort her on a journey via the desolate, war-scarred panorama. As they journey, the strain between them shifts — Claudette, looking for that means within the ruins of her life, and Atom, hardened by warfare’s lingering grip, confront the load of their pasts in a nation the place historical past refuses to be buried. What begins as an escape transforms right into a meditation on reminiscence, trauma, and the delicate, typically illusory nature of freedom.
Fractured Conversations and the Weight of Conflict
After Dreaming
4
/5
- Launch Date
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February 14, 2025
- Runtime
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105 Minutes
- Director
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Christine Haroutounian
- Writers
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Christine Haroutounian
Forged
- Mesmerizing cinematography that blurs the road between realism and abstraction.
- Considerate use of lengthy takes and framing that deepens thematic resonance.
- A haunting meditation on warfare, reminiscence, and nationwide id.
- The elliptical storytelling resists simple decision, which can frustrate these searching for a transparent narrative arc.
- Some viewers might discover the gradual pacing and use of focus alienating, although we discover it clever.
Haroutounian’s hypnotic, extremely stylized debut characteristic affords an Armenian panorama each tactile and summary, suffused with the load of warfare but vibrating with the quiet, flickering moments that exist between despair and charm. The movie follows Claudette, a younger lady whose father has been killed in a hostile act of mistaken id, although she stays unaware. A soldier named Atom is tasked with taking her on a visit away from house till funeral preparations are made. What follows just isn’t a lot a highway movie as it’s a drifting, trance-like descent into the psychic and cultural residues of a warfare that, regardless of official declarations, has by no means actually ended.
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The movie resists typical narrative constructions, unfolding as an alternative like a reminiscence in real-time. Claudette and Atom’s interactions are sparse but laden with unstated tensions. She is deeply inside, her feelings barely cresting the floor, whereas he’s hardened but fractured, bearing the scars of a life dictated by warfare.
Their exchanges — about horoscopes, responsibility, household — usually are not conversations within the conventional sense, however reflections of two souls making an attempt to find themselves in a fractured world. In a single key second, they stand earlier than Mount Ararat. To Claudette, it’s lovely; to Atom, her admiration makes her sound like a vacationer. The mountain, with its historic and geopolitical weight, turns into emblematic of their variations and an emblem of how warfare permeates notion itself.
Visible Poetry: The Artwork of Blurred Focus
Haroutounian and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin craft a visible language steeped in poetic abstraction. The movie’s putting use of focus is considered one of its most radical instruments; topics typically emerge from blurs, their kinds materializing as if conjured from the haze of historical past. The lengthy takes, at instances testing the endurance of a stressed viewers, are meticulously designed to make us sit within the second, to really feel the stress of time stretching and collapsing. Frames inside frames — a soldier shouting, “Free, unbiased,” exterior a temple, a mass wedding ceremony unfolding on a tv whereas actual fireworks burst exterior — create a mise-en-scène that consistently interrogates the character of freedom, autonomy, and the performativity of id.
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Echoes of cinematic principle are embedded all through After Dreaming. The movie’s use of close-ups, significantly in a rapturous wedding ceremony sequence, calls to thoughts the work of early movie theorist Hugo Münsterberg, who argued that the close-up’s energy lies in its potential to make us expertise emotion extra intimately than actuality itself. Right here, the close-ups of males enjoying devices, of a bride’s solemn face, of our bodies pressed collectively in celebration and mourning, transcend mere commentary. These photos, layered and recursive, rework into incantations—acts of documentation that recommend historical past is rarely actually prior to now however consistently revisiting us via repetition and ritual.
The performances are mesmerizing and restrained, significantly that of Claudette, performed with quiet depth by an actress whose presence is commonly noticed slightly than explicated and calls for consideration. Atom, whose stoicism borders on menace, carries a looming pressure, particularly in scenes the place his authority goes unquestioned just by advantage of his uniform. There’s an eerie undercurrent to their relationship; she absorbs his borderline hostility with little resistance, and in a disquieting second after an evening of intimacy, a portrait of Jesus morphs into the Virgin Mary and again once more — a fleeting, surreal gesture that blurs guilt, energy, and gendered violence into one spectral imaginative and prescient.
How Conflict Continues within the Our bodies & Minds of Survivors
After Dreaming is an unflinching meditation on the unresolved tensions of a nation in transition. The movie’s remaining motion — a haunting juxtaposition of battlefield imagery and wedding ceremony bells, of troopers performing drills that resemble dance — collapses previous, current, and future right into a single, liminal area. In Haroutounian’s world, warfare doesn’t finish with a declaration; it lingers within the our bodies that survive it, within the silence between phrases, within the structure of reminiscence itself.
Not all audiences will give up to the movie’s immersive pacing. Its refusal to stick to traditional narrative rhythms, its elliptical storytelling, and its languorous cinematography demand endurance. However for these keen to interact with its hypnotic pull, After Dreaming affords one thing uncommon: the possibility to dwell inside an unfamiliar reminiscence, to expertise cinema as an act of cultural archaeology, to glimpse, nevertheless fleetingly, the spectral echoes of historical past within the current. After Dreaming premiered on the Berlin Worldwide Movie Pageant; discover its subsequent screenings and knowledge right here.