Film archive, 2025

After Dreaming

Երազելուց հետո

Director Christine HAROUTOUNIAN

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

In Armenia, where the shadows of war still cast their long reach, Claudette embarks on a road trip to a remote monastery with a soldier Atom, unaware that her father has been killed after being mistaken for the enemy. The camera blurs the boundaries of reality, poetically illuminating the languid bodies and scarred landscapes of an uneasy ′post-dream′ state. Slow handheld shots and focus that seems to blur and contract follow the unstable breathing of survivors, capturing the emptiness within the human soul. A collective wedding ceremony unfolding to traditional music for approximately 15 minutes dramatically reveals the intimacy and daily life destroyed and eroded by war, marking the film′s climactic moment. This dreamlike journey invites audiences into a drowsy, half-conscious world, imprinting upon each viewer′s dreams what the director calls the ′genocide brain′—the collective trauma and perpetual anxiety of diaspora that passes through generations.