Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Dreaming Is Not Sleeping (2025)

Like a half-remembered reverie glimpsed through shadow and light, Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Dreaming Is Not Sleeping weaves an intricate tapestry where existential longing converges with poetic cinema. As fleeting and enigmatic as the illusions conjured in Alexander Sokurov’s filmic oneiric realms, Rashidi’s latest work expands upon his enduring fascination with the ephemeral nature of the moving image, urging viewers to reflect on the very acts of watching, remembering, and wandering through the liminal spaces of consciousness. By interlacing haunting voice-over with hypnotic, painterly imagery, Dreaming Is Not Sleeping draws its audience into a realm that hovers between lucidity and inner vision—one that challenges our understanding of time, memory, and the flickering boundary between reality and nocturnal imaginings.

The Film’s Conceptual Framework

From its evocative title onward, Dreaming Is Not Sleeping delineates a crucial distinction between mere unconsciousness and the active potential of visions. An ever-present voice-over shapes the film’s contemplative tone, delivering stark philosophical assertions that seamlessly blend with surreal visuals. The effect recalls Marguerite Duras’s elliptical narratives, where interior monologue becomes the pulse of the cinematic experience. Recurrent motifs of time, memory, and the vagaries of human relationships form a persistent undercurrent: Who are we when memory dissolves into phantasm, and how does cinema become the portal that mediates our recollections? By posing these questions, Rashidi reveals the delicate interplay between conscious thought, hidden desire, and the lens that frames them both.

Clairvoyance and the Hazy Lens of Memory

In the film’s opening passages, the voice-over urges viewers to embrace “a state of clairvoyance … merging the seen with the unseen,” suggesting that the work should be approached “through the hazy lens of memory.” Acknowledging that audiences bring personal histories and subjective biases to their viewing experience, Dreaming Is Not Sleeping foregrounds its own reflexive stance. We witness figures haunted by their own stories—a couple in a creaking theatre, a blacksmith, solitary observers—each entwined in webs of longing, regret, and poetic rumination. The film, in turn, seems to watch us, aware that cinema’s transformative power lies as much in the viewer’s psyche as it does on the screen.

Narrative and Structure

Though it carries traces of a narrative—particularly in its depiction of a couple revisiting their past through the flicker of an old projector—Dreaming Is Not Sleeping embraces a nonlinear structure. Rashidi intersperses contemplative passages with voice-overs that emerge like poetic essays, meditating on impermanence. These reflections linger on the notion that all creations inevitably succumb to entropy, returning “to dust.” Fragmented recollections flit between scenes that may belong to objective reality or drifting fantasy, leaving audiences suspended in a zone of shimmering possibility.

The Theatre as a Liminal Space

At the heart of the film lies a deserted, softly ominous theatre, a crucible for existential introspection. Against the hush of its antiquated seats, a man and a woman gather to witness what may be the cinematic record of their relationship—past, present, and yet to come. In this echoing space, time becomes elastic, memories overlap with immediate experience, and the film itself emerges as a device for travelling through personal histories. Here, echoes of Soviet cinematic traditions ripple through the composition: the interplay of silhouettes and half-light frames the couple’s quiet reflections, balancing precariously between the ephemeral and the eternal. Silence amplifies the weight of their secrets, as though the empty hall were summoning everything they have yet to say.

Visual Aesthetics and Imagery

While no single frame is publicly available for scrutiny, the film’s aesthetic sensibility aligns with Rashidi’s signature style: meditative shots at once intimate and abstract, where texture, colour, and framing carry emotional weight. The sparks forged by a blacksmith’s hammer punctuate the prevailing darkness, reflecting life’s transient flashes of beauty. Meanwhile, lines like “not even a tiny ray of light can pierce this impenetrable darkness” allude to the deep shadows that shape the film’s visual core, leading us into a realm that is simultaneously otherworldly and unnervingly real.

Suffering, Memory, and the Human Condition

A vein of suffering courses through the voice-over, contemplating the loneliness and unfulfilled desire that underscore human existence. With quiet urgency, Rashidi’s narration ventures into the same territory that his broader oeuvre often charts: yearning, regret, and the aching distance between internal sensation and external reality. At times, the film suggests that suffering is not merely inevitable but also a catalyst for creative endeavour—an impetus that kindles new illusions and fuels cinematic artistry. One of its most penetrating lines reflects that “the most tremendous state of existence” might be “never to have been born at all,” counterbalanced by the suggestion that we cannot fully live—or make art—without the tangible anchors or illusions that sustain us.

Dreams as Creation and Destruction

From its title to its final breath, the film explores the distinction between sleep and imaginative wandering. These inner excursions are transformative, able to tower “like mountains” one moment and tear through “countless other aspirations” the next. This potent duality mirrors cinema’s capacity to both enchant and unsettle us—a magic theatre of illusions where we construct and deconstruct ourselves in turn.

Rashidi’s Experimental Approach

Fans of Rashidi’s past work will recognize his signature disruption of linear narratives, favouring what might be termed poetic fragmentation. The camera lingers on both the mundane and the ethereal, while voice-overs probe the deepest layers of the mind. This tension—between the tangible surfaces of daily life and the swirl of interior monologue—forms the essential vocabulary of Rashidi’s cinema. In Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, these elements reach a new level of introspection, gliding from personal yearnings to sweeping reflections on violence, relationship failures, and the cyclical nature of artistic expression.

Such shifting layers reward repeated viewings. One pass may reveal the ache of lost connections—“I miss so many people simultaneously”—while another underscores the looming presence of unspoken fears. Each revisit peels back new dimensions of Rashidi’s multifaceted vision, inviting us deeper into its philosophical labyrinth.

Conclusion: The Hypnotic Gesture of the Unresolved

In Dreaming Is Not Sleeping, Rouzbeh Rashidi composes a quiet rhapsody of time, memory, and mirage. Subconscious echoes stir within this crucible of mellifluous inquiry, where no definitive answers dwell—only the potent hush of unanswered riddles. Drifting images and murmured soliloquies unravel temporal borders, inviting us to behold our own fragile transience. The film’s refusal to resolve becomes its most hypnotic gesture, compelling reflection on longing, impermanence, and the silent collisions of past and present. Rashidi’s work lingers in the tenuous realm of the unspoken. Within that elusive threshold, where presence and absence intermingle, cinema finds a fleeting grace: unsettling, enthralling, and achingly human.