Dreams in Nightmares 💖,
dir. Shatara Michelle Ford, 2024, USA/Taiwan/UK, 128 min.
Saturday, June 21, 2025, 8:30 pm, New Parkway (Oakland)
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| Dreams in Nightmares |
Dreams in Nightmares is a road trip movie, but not in the sense of a buddy comedy; this is definitely a drama. A group of college friends have settled, two in Brooklyn, one in Los Angeles, and the fourth … who knows where? When the other 3 realize they haven’t heard from Kel in months, they set off on a spontaneous road trip to find them. The trip takes them much farther than they expected, both in literal miles driven and in exploring their connections to themselves and to each other.
Z (Denée Benton, pictured center) has been having dream visions of her ancestors trying to give her some sort of message, but can’t quite get to the part of the dream when the message is actually delivered. The other two struggle to balance artistic expression with paying the bills. The beginning of the film felt a little slow at first, but the pace sustains through the film, and turns out to be just the right speed for the characters to slowly open up. The director and the cast are majority queer and trans Black actors, and that bond to the material really comes through.
Dreams in Nightmares is at its core a character study, with four complicated, deep characters confronting the ways their life choices increase (or sacrifice) their Black, queer, artistic joy (to borrow a phrase from the Frameline program, but I couldn’t have said it better). Definitely a must see.
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