After Dreaming

In an Armenia after war, yet before peace, an itinerant well-digger is mistaken for an enemy and killed by villagers. Wanting to withhold the news from their daughter Claudette, the victim’s family requests a haggard soldier named Atom to take Claudette away on a road trip until the funeral is over. On the road, as Atom and Claudette find themselves increasingly drawn to each other’s mysteries, their journey turns into an intimate drift through the scarred spaces of a war-torn country. Rather than follow a linear plot, Christine Haroutounian’s hypnotic, highly stylized debut feature unfolds like snatches from a fever dream, through spellbinding vignettes steeped in the mythologies of war, nation, family and religion. The strikingly original handheld cinematography makes creative use of fuzzy focus, driving the imagery to the edge of abstraction, while repetitions in speech, gesture and action are mobilized into a ritualistic, musical rhythm – most bracingly in an elaborate wedding scene that works up an incantatory, trance-like atmosphere. Defying naturalism and facile psychology, After Dreaming draws viewers into a singular space-time experience, an adventure in vision.