In a small blue cabin at the end of his garden, Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels finds a place of quiet to dream of a film containing all the films he has ever imagined. As the seasons turn, Pauwels lets time carry him through memories and past familiar objects. From newspaper clippings, old letters preserved in a cigar box, cowrie shells and other such “fossils”, Pauwels concocts imagined journeys that weave together fragments of life and fiction. The film unfolds like a playful wandering through time and space, traversing oceans, continents and eras. As one adventure unfolds into the next and sets the journey in motion once again, each remembered image becomes part of a larger whole: a vast, dreamlike puzzle of possible stories and selves.
“The sense of adventure and wanderings of Odysseus run through the film, tempting other adventurers and travellers. The path is the destination and Eric Pauwels takes many paths in creating a little masterpiece about meditation, dreams and films. A very special film, enjoyable and eccentric.”
Ruhrtriennale
“Les films rêvés is in no way a nostalgic inventory of films yet to be made, nor a catalogue of immensely captivating stories, but rather the persistent questioning of a unique instance that is at the same time one of the personality’s essential components, without which sight is blind, a condition for humanity’s development and the source of all artistic creation: the dream and its corollary, paradise.”
Yann Lardeau
