There’s a moment early in Christine Haroutounian’sAfter Dreamingwhere a horse drinks from a pond, its muzzle haloed by glimmering sunset light. Slowly, the horse comes into focus. Then, just as slowly, the man watching it does too. This patient unraveling of detail, this meditative unfurling of perception, establishes the film’s aesthetic philosophy. We are not merely observing; we areentering a liminal space, a world where history breathes in the present, where memory lingers not as recollection but as lived experience.
When a well-digger is mistaken for an enemy and executed in post-war Armenia, his family shields the truth from his daughter, Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan). To keep her away from the unfolding grief, they enlist disaffected soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan) to escort her on a journey through the desolate, war-scarred landscape. As they travel, the tension between them shifts — Claudette, searching for meaning in the ruins of her life, and Atom, hardened by war’s lingering grip, confront the weight of their pasts in a nation where history refuses to be buried. What begins as an escape transforms into a meditation on memory, trauma, and the fragile, often illusory nature of freedom.
Fractured Conversations and the Weight of War
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.
Haroutounian’s hypnotic, highly stylized debut feature offers an Armenian landscape both tactile and abstract, suffused with the weight of war yet vibrating with the quiet, flickering moments that exist between despair and grace. The film follows Claudette, a young woman whose father has been killed in a hostile act of mistaken identity, though she remains unaware. A soldier named Atom is tasked with taking her on a trip away from home until funeral arrangements are made. What follows is not so much a road film as it is a drifting, trance-like descent into the psychic and cultural residues of a war that, despite official declarations, has never truly ended.
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The film resists conventional narrative structures, unfolding instead like a memory in real-time. Claudette and Atom’s interactions are sparse yet laden with unspoken tensions. She is deeply internal, her emotions barely cresting the surface, while he is hardened yet fractured, bearing the scars of a life dictated by war.
Their exchanges — about horoscopes, duty, family — are not conversations in the traditional sense, but reflections of two souls attempting to locate themselves in a fractured world. In one key moment, they stand before Mount Ararat. To Claudette, it is beautiful; to Atom, her admiration makes her sound like a tourist. The mountain, with its historical and geopolitical weight, becomes emblematic of their differences and a symbol of how war permeates perception itself.
Visual Poetry: The Art of Blurred Focus
Haroutounian and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin craft a visual language steeped in poetic abstraction. The film’s striking use of focus is one of its most radical tools; subjects often emerge from blurs, their forms materializing as if conjured from the haze of history. The long takes, at times testing the patience of a restless audience, are meticulously designed to make us sit in the moment, to feel the pressure of time stretching and collapsing. Frames within frames — a soldier shouting, “Free, independent,” outside a temple, a mass wedding unfolding on a television while real fireworks burst outside — create a mise-en-scène that constantly interrogates the nature of freedom, autonomy, and the performativity of identity.
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Echoes of cinematic theory are embedded throughoutAfter Dreaming. The film’s use of close-ups, particularly in a rapturous wedding sequence, calls to mind the work of early film theorist Hugo Münsterberg, who argued that the close-up’s power lies in its ability to make us experience emotion more intimately than reality itself. Here, the close-ups of men playing instruments, of a bride’s solemn face, of bodies pressed together in celebration and mourning, transcend mere observation. These images, layered and recursive, transform into incantations—acts of documentation that suggest history is never truly in the past but constantly revisiting us through repetition and ritual.
The performances are mesmerizing and restrained, particularly that of Claudette, played with quiet intensity by an actress whose presence is often observed rather than explicated and demands attention. Atom, whose stoicism borders on menace, carries a looming tension, especially in scenes where his authority goes unquestioned simply by virtue of his uniform. There’s an eerie undercurrent to their relationship; she absorbs his borderline hostility with little resistance, and in a disquieting moment after a night of intimacy, a portrait of Jesus morphs into the Virgin Mary and back again — a fleeting, surreal gesture that blurs guilt, power, and gendered violence into one spectral vision.
How War Continues in the Bodies & Minds of Survivors
After Dreamingis an unflinching meditation on the unresolved tensions of a nation in transition. The film’s final movement — a haunting juxtaposition of battlefield imagery and wedding bells, of soldiers performing drills that resemble dance — collapses past, present, and future into a single, liminal space. In Haroutounian’s world, war does not end with a declaration; it lingers in the bodies that survive it, in the silence between words, in the architecture of memory itself.
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Not all audiences will surrender to the film’s immersive pacing. Its refusal to adhere to conventional narrative rhythms, its elliptical storytelling, and its languorous cinematography demand patience. But for those willing to engage with its hypnotic pull,After Dreamingoffers something rare: the chance to live inside an unfamiliar memory, to experience cinema as an act of cultural archaeology, to glimpse, however fleetingly, the spectral echoes of history in the present.After Dreamingpremiered at the Berlin International Film Festival;find its next screenings and information here.
