Dreams
Dir.
Michel Franco
/
2025
/
98 mins
/
USA, Mexico
/
English, Spanish
/
Victorian Premiere
Jessica Chastain reunites with Michel Franco for this scathing yet enthralling drama about immigration, manipulation and a romance built on inequality.
Fernando illegally crosses the border and turns up at the San Francisco home of Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), the patron of his Mexico City ballet school – and his secret lover. Reputation is key to her family’s work of bankrolling arts projects for the disadvantaged, so while she welcomes her uninvited guest, she also distances him from her bubble of privilege. In retaliation, he spurns her apparent generosity and seeks to establish his own foothold in the US dance world. Their attraction may remain as fiery as ever; but, when love is held together by so many tenuous strings, something’s bound to snap.
Dreams marks the second collaboration between Cannes-awarded filmmaker Michel Franco and Oscar winner Chastain after Memory (MIFF 2024). Here, the latter deftly portrays a liberal gradually corrupted by entitlement, while Isaac Hernández – the American Ballet Theatre’s first ever Mexican principal dancer – embodies a young artist tangled in a web of power plays and performativity. With taut plotting and crisp cinematography, this Berlinale-premiering film exposes the toxic flip side of progressivism and how kindness can, when pushed, devolve into cruelty.
"A chilly, angrily intense and deeply pessimistic tale of erotic obsession among the liberal super-rich … A gripping emotional drama, supercharged with toxic sensuality and fear.” – The Guardian
Fernando illegally crosses the border and turns up at the San Francisco home of Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), the patron of his Mexico City ballet school – and his secret lover. Reputation is key to her family’s work of bankrolling arts projects for the disadvantaged, so while she welcomes her uninvited guest, she also distances him from her bubble of privilege. In retaliation, he spurns her apparent generosity and seeks to establish his own foothold in the US dance world. Their attraction may remain as fiery as ever; but, when love is held together by so many tenuous strings, something’s bound to snap.
Dreams marks the second collaboration between Cannes-awarded filmmaker Michel Franco and Oscar winner Chastain after Memory (MIFF 2024). Here, the latter deftly portrays a liberal gradually corrupted by entitlement, while Isaac Hernández – the American Ballet Theatre’s first ever Mexican principal dancer – embodies a young artist tangled in a web of power plays and performativity. With taut plotting and crisp cinematography, this Berlinale-premiering film exposes the toxic flip side of progressivism and how kindness can, when pushed, devolve into cruelty.
"A chilly, angrily intense and deeply pessimistic tale of erotic obsession among the liberal super-rich … A gripping emotional drama, supercharged with toxic sensuality and fear.” – The Guardian