AFTER DREAMING

Not too far from the Ararat Valley, the biblical land where Noah’s Ark was found after the flood to commence humankind anew, in the perilous, contested region of Artsakh (for Armenians), or Nagorno-Karabakh (for Azerbaijanis), a profound, metaphysical journey unfolds in the war-torn countryside. A young Armenian soldier travels alongside a teenage girl who has just lost her father, but isn’t yet aware of it – after all, on the eve of the funeral, her family sought to remove her from the village, so that she would never come to know that the man’s cold-blooded murder was committed by his fellow villagers, who had mistaken him for an enemy. Departing from linear storytelling and defying realism, the filmmaker takes the camera in hand and follows her heroes into a descent that resembles a fever dream, wading through volatile, blurred, ethereal images that soften the edges of reality. Embracing abstraction; and as if entranced by a transcendental rhythm, she weaves together vignettes drawn from the universal mythology of war, nation, religion, and family, in order to escape into a new realm of poetic vision.