Dreaming Is Not Sleeping (2025): Insights from a Discussion at the World Premiere

Personal Note:

Drawing on the spirited Q&A that followed the Berlin premiere of my experimental feature Dreaming Is Not Sleeping on 20 April 2025—ably moderated by my colleague and co-conspirator Daniel Zander—I have allowed myself to invent an article, or perhaps a fever-dream diary, of that night.

This narration is filtered through an alternate persona, a true heteronym in the Pessoa-esque sense—one of those parallel selves a writer cultivates to speak in voices unavailable to the "daylight" self. Since founding EFS Film School in 2019, that persona has grown alongside me, such that the institution now feels both identical to me and yet oddly other: a living double.

Reimagining the Q&A instead of merely transcribing it may appear quixotic, yet the gesture is critical. Independent filmmakers routinely confront a festival system increasingly inhospitable to unruly work—an arena of "sanctimonious gatekeepers," as one recent manifesto put it. In the vacuum left by closed doors, I have sought to engineer my own ecosystem of screenings, conversations, and encounters, taking cues from newer playbooks on self-sustaining production and DIY distribution.

Desperation, not vanity, propels these strategies. Like many peers, I burn to place films before audiences, plead for festival slots, and court curators; invention becomes a survival trait when those paths narrow.

My practice is likewise bound to the productive friction of failure—the rejections, postponed grants, and stalled cuts that accumulate like scar tissue yet keep the muscles limber. Artists have long noted how setbacks can sharpen resolve and stretch the imagination. Without such obstructions, I might have evolved into a very different filmmaker—perhaps a safer one.

Inevitably, I reconstruct the Q&A from memory, and cognitive science reminds us that memory is a patchwork, not a perfect recording. What appears here, therefore, drifts between verifiable exchange and half-sleep reverie, the latter occupying the penumbral space critics of narrative call "re-narration," the creative filling of gaps left by any event.

Finally, I thank Daniel Zander—steadfast friend and partner in this cosmic tragicomedy—whose presence that evening kept the dialogue orbiting just close enough to reality to make the flight risk worthwhile. I would like to clarify that this article was authored by EFS Film School, not by me. After all, it is not my work; it never has been.

Dreaming Is Not Sleeping (2025):

Insights from a Discussion at the World Premiere

The world premiere of Rouzbeh Rashidi's experimental film Dreaming Is Not Sleeping (2025) was accompanied by an in-depth public discussion that illuminated the film's philosophical underpinnings and innovative cinematic approach. The conversation featured the film's director, Rouzbeh Rashidi, in dialogue with moderator Daniel Zander – himself a filmmaker, philosopher, and poet based in Berlin – before an audience of the screening attendees. Rashidi, known for his prolific avant-garde oeuvre, opened the session by humbly characterising Dreaming Is Not Sleeping as "some kind of a… philosophical rambling". He admitted, "I still don't know. I don't understand my own films… Understanding is a very overrated concept". Rather than encourage analytical interpretation, Rashidi urged the audience to engage with the film in "a sensorial way" akin to the naïve wonder of "the first audience who would engage with silent cinema". This remark set the tone for a discussion that delved into the film's themes, the director's creative process, and the broader aesthetic and philosophical ideas at play. What follows is a structured analysis of the key insights from that discussion – from Rashidi's artistic influences and experimental methods to the oneiric motifs and reactions the film evoked, culminating in a reflection on the significance of this dialogue for understanding Dreaming Is Not Sleeping and Rashidi's cinematic vision.

Throughout the conversation, Rashidi placed great emphasis on the state of mind with which one approaches cinema, advocating a return to a kind of primal receptivity. Citing the legendary New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, he described how early silent cinema possessed a childlike quality that demanded viewers assume the role of a nurturing parent, approaching the medium with openness and curiosity. In Rashidi's view, much of this innocence has been lost in contemporary cinema, which too often treats film as "a mature, horrifically intelligent being" – an attitude he "hate[s]". Instead, Rashidi insists on "regress[ing] and go[ing] to [the] primal stages of understanding" when engaging with film art. By embracing naïveté and even discomfort, both the filmmaker and audience can experience cinema more viscerally and honestly, without the overbearing need to intellectually "understand" every aspect.

Rashidi's eclectic intellectual influences deeply inform this philosophy of creative innocence. During the discussion, he revealed inspirations ranging from Christian mysticism to classical Persian poetry. For instance, he was "deeply influenced by the writings of Meister Eckhart," the 13th-century German theologian and mystic, admiring Eckhart's unfiltered, almost childlike devotional language. Rashidi noted a kinship between Eckhart's passionately naïve spiritual fervour and the elemental explorations in his own film. He also mentioned Blaise Pascal and the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi as kindred spirits in acknowledging human "suffering" and spiritual longing with frank simplicity. These influences point to Rashidi's interest in a direct, unpretentious confrontation with existential questions – an approach he channels into Dreaming Is Not Sleeping through poetic voiceover and imagery.

Hand-in-hand with this outlook is Rashidi's reverence for early cinema comedy as a model of clarity and directness. He professed great love for silent-era filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, whom he watches "on a regular basis". In Rashidi's analysis, their slapstick films possess a stripped-down, almost fable-like quality that immediately makes their moral and emotional stakes legible. "They are the most political films of all time," he argued, precisely because of their simplicity: "You know exactly where you're going – police cannot be something good… I have to save this kid from the world". Here, Rashidi alludes to Chaplin's The Kid (1921) as an example of a film that operates on an "absolute naivety" and "archaic" emotional logic. Such works exemplify the idea that a film's politics and meaning need not reside in overt social commentary but in how the film is made and the sincerity of its emotional communication. As Rashidi put it, "the film is never political by [its] subject" so much as by the authenticity and independence of its creation. This emphasis on form and process over didactic content recurred throughout the discussion, linking Rashidi's philosophical stance to his concrete working methods.

Rashidi's commitment to a personal, unorthodox approach is also evident in the way he makes films. The discussion shed light on his experimental process, developed over years of working at the margins of the film industry. Rashidi recounted the origins of his DIY ethos in his youth in Iran, where restrictive political conditions and heavy bureaucracy made conventional filmmaking nearly impossible. Rather than seeking state permissions or large crews, he "retrieved, literally, in the underground" of his home to create art in isolation. This self-imposed creative seclusion became a defining habit: even after leaving Iran in 2004 and living in Ireland and later Germany, Rashidi maintained what he wryly called a "cultural suicide" – avoiding the prominent themes of his identity and working outside mainstream frameworks. "I never made films about [Iran or Ireland]. I can't," he confessed, noting that while he is a "consequence" of those societies, he has "never embraced" that identity in his art. Instead, Rashidi describes himself as a "psychonaut rather than [an] astronaut," one who travels inward through layers of psyche, emotion, and memory rather than outward through overt social reality. This inward-oriented, idiosyncratic process has placed him on a unique creative margin – a position he regards as both a "curse" and a strange "blessing" for the originality it sparks.

One of the most striking aspects of Rashidi's filmmaking practice discussed at the premiere is his interplay of old and new technologies to generate novel aesthetics. Dreaming Is Not Sleeping was filmed using a hybrid technique: Rashidi shot the footage on an ultra-modern digital cinema camera equipped with nineteenth-century optical lenses. This unusual combination deliberately introduces technical imperfections. The antique lenses – "too old and exhausted" to resolve images with modern crispness – had to be manually adjusted "like a lamp" for focus and aperture. The result of mounting such archaic glass on a high-end camera was a host of aberrations and unpredictabilities: "It creates problems on a very… modern camera," Rashidi laughed, "[but] this conflict of material and reality creates your aesthetic". In other words, the tension between incompatible tools forces creative solutions and serendipitous visuals that would be impossible in a more controlled setup. Rashidi compared himself in these moments to "a primal human being at the edge of [a] cliff looking at the landscape" without a predefined method, discovering the film's form through trial and error in situ. This embrace of technological "conflict" and even failure as a generative force is central to his process. He cited the early cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès – known for his cinematic "trickery" and magic – as an inspiration for the kind of imaginative, illusion-driven cinema he prefers, in contrast to the straightforward documentary realism of the Lumière brothers. Rashidi leans toward the Méliès side of cinema's "bizarre junction between Lumière and Méliès", favouring fantasy, horror, and the "occult" possibilities of the film while still drawing on real environments and objects (such as the abandoned locations featured in Dreaming Is Not Sleeping). The landscapes and ruined structures he filmed in Germany and Poland become, in his vision, sites of an archaeological and anthropological "study" conducted with a kind of clairvoyant imagination. "Is it possible to have memory without the actual event taking place?" Rashidi asked rhetorically, explaining how he often grapples with memories of places and people that "never existed" except in his imagination. In the film, this translates into imagery that treats real locations as triggers for subjective memory and dreams, blurring fact and fiction – an approach rooted in the director's personal method of introspection and fabrication.

Rashidi's willingness to experiment extends to the film's soundscape and narrative form as well. In Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, he took the bold step of using an AI-generated voice as the narrator – "the first time" he had done so. During the Q&A, moderator Daniel Zander admitted he "would never have suspected" the disembodied male voice was synthetic until he read an interview with Rashidi after the screening. Rashidi pulled back the curtain on this process: he wrote a script of poetic monologues and then trained a text-to-speech software to recite it. "You feed the script, and you train [the voice]… and you play with it," he explained, describing the AI voice's creation as "extraordinary" to witness – like watching "some kind of embryo" grow into being. Rather than aiming for a flawless human imitation, Rashidi "implanted the imperfection in the voice" deliberately, ensuring that it retained slight distortions and mechanical intonations. These flaws paradoxically lent the narration a sense of vulnerability and otherworldliness akin to the fragile human voice used in his previous film, Elpis (where author Claudia Basrawi read the voiceover). To contextualise this unconventional narrator, Rashidi credited the voice in the film to a mysterious "Meister Rumelant," framing it as if it were the work of a 13th-century wandering poet. (The name evokes a genuine medieval Minnesänger, Meister Rumelant, cleverly blurring fiction and history.) Rashidi confessed that this little artifice – essentially assigning the AI a persona and backstory – helped him cope with the uncanniness of hearing his deeply personal text spoken by a non-human voice. The synthetic narrator unsettled him so much that "I had to lie… create [a figure] somehow… in order not to lose my mind," he said, half in jest. The gesture encapsulates Rashidi's broader attitude: embracing new technology's creative potential coupled with self-aware humour and caution about its existential implications.

Underlining all these practical techniques is Rashidi's view of filmmaking as an ongoing, process-oriented craft rather than a result-oriented art. He described his relationship to his films in pragmatic terms, echoing the ethos of earlier filmmakers. At one point, he invoked the legendary director Josef von Sternberg's famous analogy: "My relationship with my film is like a doctor [with] a patient. I do my best; if the patient survives, I see the next patient; if the patient dies, too bad". Rashidi likewise refuses to overly fetishise individual works. Having produced a large number of films (dozens of features by his forties), he remarked that periods of high productivity meant "you create a lot of shit, horrible films", but those failures become a kind of education. He has, in his own words, "never glamorised art" or bought into the auteur mythos. Instead, he likens himself to a factory worker or a craftsman at a cobbler's bench: "We do things" in order to keep cinema alive and evolving. This almost anti-romantic stance is political in itself – a rejection of the market-driven pressure to package oneself as an "identity" or to produce polished gems infrequently. Rashidi aligns here with the spirit of the avant-garde, where constant creation, exploration, and even "insanity" (as he quoted from filmmaker Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema) are necessary to stay sane and authentic as an artist. "The only way for a filmmaker to remain sane is the insanity of making a film," meaning that plunging into the irrational act of creation is a cure for the madness of the world. Rashidi's own career exemplifies this principle: he must keep making films as a process of discovery and survival, whether or not each individual film finds conventional success. In Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, this philosophy manifests in a work that is unorthodox and deeply personal – a film unconcerned with mainstream formula, existing instead as a continuation of Rashidi's lifelong artistic inquiry.

Given Rashidi's intent to prioritise sensory and emotional experience over linear logic, it is fitting that Dreaming Is Not Sleeping was widely discussed in terms of dreams, consciousness, and poetic abstraction. The film's very title – an assertive paradox that dreaming is not the same as sleeping – invited interpretations during the premiere discussion. Daniel Zander suggested that Rashidi is positing a kind of philosophical axiom: "somnio ergo sum," or "I dream; therefore I am," as a riff on Descartes' famous cogito. In Zander's reading, the oneiric (dreamlike) state of the film reveals a form of truth different from waking rationality – an "irrevocable truth" accessible "within the oneiric consciousness". Indeed, Zander described the experience of watching the film as profoundly immersive and meditative. Seeing Dreaming Is Not Sleeping on the big screen for the first time, he felt "energetic synchronisation" with its rhythm and images. He was put into a state of "awe… the majestic resonance of being within the act of witnessing". Here, Zander evoked the Greek concept of thaumazein (wonder or astonishment) to characterise the film's impact, aligning with Rashidi's goal of evoking a sense of wonder beyond explanation.

One of the prominent themes that Zander and others identified in the film is the interplay of vulnerability and transcendence, what he referred to as the "language of wounds" and scars that run through the work. The voiceover text, delivered in a first-person confessional tone, often touches on pain, memory, and existential doubt (likely reflecting Rashidi's personal self-inquiry). Yet this introspective vulnerability is set against vast, at times otherworldly visuals: desolate landscapes, a solitary doorframe standing in nature, ruins overgrown by wilderness. The moderator noted one particularly arresting image of "a vast expanse and this solitary doorframe within the frame" – shot near Berlin's Teufelssee – as emblematic of the film's approach. Such imagery suggests portals and thresholds, inviting viewers into a liminal mental space. Zander connected this aesthetic to concepts in Indian philosophy, mentioning the Sanskrit term vrittis – the ripples or fluctuations of consciousness in Yoga philosophy. The film's sequences, in his view, were like vectors of energy or vibrations meeting and mutating each other, creating a kind of spiritual interplay on screen. This led him to describe the film as cultivating a "unified field of consciousness" where the boundary between viewer and film dissolves. By the final sequences of Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, Zander felt the work achieved an "astral… plane of being, of oneness, of we-ness, of now-ness" – a description he borrowed from critic Nikola Gocić's early review of the film. In other words, the film does not tell a conventional story but instead constructs a state, a shared present moment that the audience is invited to inhabit alongside the filmmaker. Zander coined the phrase "spectral essayistic pictorialism" to classify the film, emphasising its ghostly, essay-film qualities and painterly visual composition. He praised it as a "profoundly valid poetical text" in cinematic form that "viscerally" engages the spectator and "allows the spectator to refocus on themselves". This characterisation underscores how Dreaming Is Not Sleeping functions as a mirror for the viewer's own consciousness – it is less about delivering a message than about creating an occasion for self-reflection and sensorial contemplation.

The response from the general audience echoed many of these points, confirming that Rashidi's experimental gambits were effective in practice. One audience member, speaking during the Q&A, confessed that while watching the film, "I could not even listen or look at anything [else].… It was just like a stream of unconsciousness". She noted that the images and sounds flowed in a way that did "not necessarily follow… in a logical sense", yet she perceived a deeper cohesion emerging from the disjunction. Rather than finding this lack of linear narrative off-putting, she described it as "so liberating," likening the experience to floating. Rashidi welcomed this interpretation, affirming that it aligned with his intentions. He compared the film's structure to the condition of silent cinema, where disparate scenes could be montaged together to evoke a cosmic, dreamlike association. In early silent films – he gave the example of a hypothetical surreal montage where "there's [a] big existential problem on top of the city, and then someone is walking in a factory, and [then] this guy is getting killed by a vampire" – events might not connect by classical drama, but collectively they suggest a larger tapestry of human experience. Modern audiences, he argued, are too accustomed to rational coherence in art, "chained in rationality" by the structures of the contemporary world. Rashidi deliberately resists this chain. In his words, "There is no rationality, there are just a bunch of mammals floating on the rocks… in the cosmos. Life is very cosmic and irrational". By embracing the "notion of an abandonment of the modern world" and its strict logic, he attempts to capture life's essentially fragmentary and transient nature. The director went so far as to frame human existence in cosmic terms: each person we encounter is meaningful in a fleeting "fragment of time", leaving energetic "imprints" that may vanish but somehow persist in memory or feeling. This worldview directly informs Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, which is less a linear story than a mosaic of impressions, thoughts, and memories—much like the incoherent yet emotionally potent logic of dreams.

Crucially, Rashidi does not claim to have full mastery over this process; he positions himself as an agent through which the film emerges rather than a controlling author imposing meaning. "I do not necessarily understand [these energies]," he conceded when discussing the film's assembly. He described his working method as "half-cautious, half-sleepwalking", suggesting that intuition and subconscious exploration guide much of his creativity. In the Q&A, he even commended the audience member for "taking it to the real world," implying that her act of interpreting the film's abstract flow in terms of personal reality completed the artistic circuit. The film's meaning lives in this collaborative space between creator and viewer. This ties back to Rashidi's earlier point that an artwork ultimately "forgets itself" and catalyses the audience's journey. Citing Godard once more, Rashidi echoed the notion that a film achieves its purpose when it allows the viewer to remember or feel something personal that goes beyond the film itself. In this sense, the post-screening discussion – with Zander's eloquent analysis and the audience's candid reactions – was an ideal extension of the film. Rashidi likened such moments of communal reflection to "a séance" or an "initiation" ritual, where the goal is "not to educate… or even understand, but to… evoke" something in each participant. The academic tone of the conversation, filled with philosophical references and poetic metaphors, did not undercut this evocation; instead, it validated that Dreaming Is Not Sleeping could sustain and reward a high level of interpretive thought without ever yielding a single reductive explanation.

The world premiere discussion of Dreaming Is Not Sleeping offered far more than a typical film Q&A; it became an illuminating symposium on the nature of experimental cinema and the artistic vision of Rouzbeh Rashidi. Through this dialogue, we gain a portrait of Rashidi as a filmmaker rooted in paradoxes: he seeks purity through primal naivety while drawing on erudite philosophical and historical influences; he pushes the boundaries of technology (from antiquated lenses to artificial intelligence) in order to recapture an ancient, ritualistic feeling in cinema; he speaks of film as political, yet chiefly in the integrity of its making rather than in any agenda on screen. The discussion's academic register – with references to mystics, continental philosophy, and spiritual concepts – demonstrated that Rashidi's work can be engaged on a lofty intellectual plane. Yet Rashidi himself continually redirected the focus to the experience of the film, insisting on the importance of intuition, endurance, and emotional truth over analytical dissection. This balance of erudition and experiential emphasis is a hallmark of Rashidi's style and was mirrored in the conversation's structure: Zander and others articulated theoretical frameworks and analogies (from somnio ergo sum to Frank Bidart's poetry about a salamander in fire), while Rashidi answered with personal anecdotes, imaginative visions, and occasionally self-deprecating humour, grounding the dialogue in lived artistic practice.

The thematic analysis above has highlighted how the discussion touched on several key aspects of Dreaming Is Not Sleeping: its invocation of dream logic and oneiric consciousness, it is blending of confessional voice with haunting imagery, and its challenge to conventional storytelling in favour of a mosaic of "memory without event." We have also seen how Rashidi's unique background – an Iranian-born filmmaker who forged his craft in solitude – informs the film's refusal to be confined by identity or realist narrative. The significance of this discussion lies in the way it not only explicated the film's methods and themes but also exemplified the very principles Rashidi advocates. In bringing the audience into an active, interpretive engagement, the post-screening conversation became an extension of the film's artistic process. It demonstrated the productive ambiguity of Rashidi's cinema: an art that, by design, needs its viewers' intellectual and emotional participation to flourish fully.

Rashidi's comments about the "mutation" of cinema – that with each technological or cultural change", cinema… always goes through this period of mutation" – remind us that the medium is continuously evolving, and his film is one expression of that evolution in the 21st century. Likewise, his caution that "every beauty is a potential terror" reflects an artist's awareness of the thin line between transcendence and discomfort that experimental art often walks. Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, as discussed in this forum, embodies that duality: it is a film that seeks out the sublime by way of the disorienting, that finds unity in fragmentation and achieves intimacy through anonymity (even the "author" of its voice remains an enigma).

In conclusion, the world premiere conversation deepened the understanding of Dreaming Is Not Sleeping by framing it within Rashidi's broader philosophy of filmmaking. It highlighted the film's role as the second part of a larger trilogy or "triptych" in his oeuvre – a "main panel" (Haupttafel), as Zander suggested – thereby contextualising its significance in a continuing artistic journey. Perhaps most importantly, the discussion underscored the collaborative nature of meaning-making in art. Rashidi's work thrives on this collaboration: between past and present (old texts and new media), between maker and viewer, between conscious intention and unconscious discovery. As Rashidi expressed in closing, moments of genuine exchange with an audience are "very important because it's really about you now… passing the torch". In that spirit, the academic conversation around Dreaming Is Not Sleeping passes the torch to future readers and viewers, inviting them to carry forward the exploration of a cinema that dreams with open eyes.