Dreams in Nightmares (2024)

After a double-layoff, Z and Tasha, together with Lauren, a poet and artist, embark on a road trip to search for their missing artist friend, Kel. They hold a strong friendship and they also share their love for art and poetry. As the three of them travel across the Midwestern United States, what begins as a rescue mission will become a much deeper exploration of friendship, identity, artistic frustrations, and emotional bonds. The friends explore the principle of the chosen family and navigate hardships through poetry. The road trip reveals ideological tensions and recurring dreams that begin to blur the line between memory and reality by mixing past, present, and future. 

Dreams in Nightmares is a dreamlike reimagining of a road movie that is both tender and lyrical, yet bitter, radical, and avant-garde. Shatara Michelle Ford, blends together wide shots and intimate close-ups to invite the viewer to explore the lived experience of a non-white, non-straight, and non-cis character. Through a poetic approach weaving together ambiguity and surrealism, Ford’s narrative is daring and intellectual and seeks no easy resolutions. 

The director Shatara Michelle Ford, nominated in the Panorama section of Berlinale 2025, said they wanted to create a Black, gay version of Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders with influences from Mike Leigh, Jim Jarmusch and “a little bit of Kelly Reichardt and Hou Hsiao-hsien”. Tender and expansive, Ford has created an ode to chosen family and the radical act of claiming space to dream and exist beyond the systems of an increasingly fraught society.

Before the screening of Dreams in Nightmares, queer collective Unwanted Words opens the night with a powerful spoken word performance. Raw, intimate, and unapologetic: their voices set the tone for a film that drifts between dream and reality.