New VAEF films 2021

Pandemic Dreams (2021)

Reposted from https://ethnographiceye.blogspot.com

 During the coronavirus pandemic many people reported having trouble sleeping and experiencing eerie, vivid dreams or more frequent nightmares. It is presumed by researchers that the pandemic constitutes as a collective trauma: isolation, existential dread, anxiety over one’s job or financial situation, fear for the well-being of one’s family and loved ones takes a toll on everybody’s psyche. It makes it difficult for the brain to relax at night, hence the trouble sleeping and the disturbing dreams.

The aim of the film is to present a selection of bizarre, nostalgic and scary dreams from the time of the COVID pandemic and through them offer a admittedly limited document of this difficult period. Four dreams were included in the 8-minute film, each depicts a different mood connected to the pandemic. The first one, a classical nightmare offers a glimpse into the first phase when the virus was still new and completely unknown and people had to deal with lockdowns and isolation for the first time. It is an anxiety dream in which a menacing, dark figure wearing a blue medical mask threatens the dreamer. The second dream captures the longing for having nice meals with friends – it is the desire of many in isolation who had to settle for ordering food delivered by overworked, underpaid messengers. The images of these delivery people – the unsung heroes of the pandemic – are counterposed with an account of a nice feast with friends. The third dream evokes the common feeling of being separated from one’s friends by the epidemiological restrictions. The images capture the wish to escape to nature in order to be far from potentially dangerous crowds. The final sequence presents images from a physical protest which happened despite the COVID restrictions: students protesting for one of their unjustly imprisoned peer wearing masks and trying to observe social distancing (sequences of the protest by courtesy of Tiphaine Trudelle). The political struggle is juxtaposed with the dream account of physical struggle – the dreamer is trying to climb a rock wall. The four dreams together create an arch from the paralysis of fear through the nostalgia for the ‘old’ world building up to literal resistance amidst the pandemic.

All dream accounts were recorded in the dreamer’s native language, so the different tones and rhythms create different moods and tempos, as well as represent the fact that most people dream in their first languages. All the contributors are university students – their reflective, analytical daytime activity stands in contrast with the surreal, irrational dream material they are recounting. The film did not have a pre-written script – it was shaped by the process of collecting audio dream accounts. Visual sequences were shot after these were collected, images were determined by the audio accounts. Thus, the dreamers became the writers of the film. 

You can watch the final version of the film here:

Read here about its making: https://ethnographiceye.blogspot.com/2021/04/common-nightmare-can-random-collection.html