Even though the Berlinale’s Panorama and Forum are technically part of its “official selection”, they can have the feel of “parallel” strands – as Cannes would put it – as they have fully independent selectors and organisation. This is especially true of the Forum, which has its own cinema as a hub – the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art – and foregrounds films of a more authentically independently and experimental nature. Historically, it’s where the most forward-thinking and uncompromising work premieres of the festival’s whole slate, although the now-shuttered Encounters section, established by the Berlinale’s previous curators, put a broader spotlight on films that would typically be nestled in the Forum.
Merely having a dramatic narrative film in this section creates a certain expectation around it, in a manner distinct from any other strand of the Berlinale – the question becomes how it would justify itself making sense in these environs? Looking at this year’s crop, either they were more indirect and less audience-friendly than a usual Panorama title (If You Are Afraid You Put Your Heart into Your Mouth and Smile), or made outside the “system” and the domestic industry (the Australian two-hander Fwends). But Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming excelled as a true interrogation of narrative form, showing how the aesthetic experimentation typical of a Forum film could be seen in a deceptively more conventional piece filmmaking.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Haroutounian’s debut feature alights on her family homeland of Armenia, setting a narrative amidst its long-term conflict with Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. After the mistaken killing of a well-digger, misidentified as the enemy by forces of his own side, the man’s family doesn’t want to inform his teenage daughter Claudine (Veronika Poghosyan), entrusting the soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan) to take her far from harm’s way as possible. Utilising a visual technique where only part of the frame is in focus, thanks to an additional lens affixed to the main camera body, Haroutounian tracks both the tension and growing amorous connection between the two young people, as they embark on their road trip to nowhere in particular.
All being said, the above precis doesn’t especially capture the experience of viewing After Dreaming; Haroutounian mainly aims to hypnotise us, making the primary characters’ smallest gestures riven with suspense, as we can feel the feelings repressed by their previous parochial existences finally breaking through. In its second half, the filmmaker shows us various extended sequences that don’t have a linear connection to previous events, as a group wedding some time in the future, where Claudine and Atom are getting married, crosscuts with small army battalions in strength-training exercises; later in this passage of the film, a swirling aerial camera somewhere between the recent EO and Michael Snow’s classic structural film La Région centrale seems to mimic the POV of airstrikes on civilians, or a liberated breakthrough in perception.
After Dreaming starts solid and material and eventually becomes more inscrutable; it’s a reductive comparison, but this type of artistic signature from an Armenian filmmaker reminded me of Sergei Parajanov, the most celebrated from that national cinema. Story is subsumed into imagery, and imagery into poetry: you stare at, and then swim in its conveyance of meaning, absorbing it yet never fully letting it envelop you. And if full comprehension is granted, the sense of mystery never evaporates.
David Katz
©FIPRESCI 2025