The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]

The post “Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.