Anchored by Jessica Chastain and acclaimed Mexican dancer Isaac Hernández, Dreams is a powerful, prescient meditation on immigration.
Michel Franco’s Dreams, starring Isaac Hernández and Jessica Chastain, premiered in competition at this year’s Berlinale. Spanning 95 minutes, the film takes on some of the most pressing and politically charged debates of our time; immigration, colonialism, gender, and the body. Yet Franco manages to avoid cliché, overwriting, or preaching. Instead, he explores these themes through strikingly cinematic storytelling, driven by the tension between his characters and the evolving complexity of their relationships.
Hernández plays Fernando, a role that closely mirrors his own life; like the character, he is a Mexican ballet dancer. In reality, Hernandez made history as the first Mexican principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, earning global recognition as one of today’s most celebrated ballerinas. Fernando, by contrast, is at the beginning of his career. An acclaimed young dancer in Mexico, he dreams of international fame and a life in the U.S. When he begins an affair with Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), the company’s wealthy American sponsor, he makes the life-threatening decision to cross the border illegally to be with her.
The film opens with a devastating sequence; a lorry rattles through the desert, crammed with migrants, their screams muffled, until we finally see inside the packed bodies of the recently people-smuggled humans. Fernando manages to escape, trekking across the arid desert before hitchhiking his way to Jennifer’s swanky San Francisco apartment. Jennifer, the daughter of a powerful philanthropic family, works alongside her well-connected father and brother, running a foundation that funds the arts across the city and abroad.
Their reunion, however, is fraught. Fernando, who has just risked his life to be with Jennifer, collides with the carefully controlled world she has built. Throughout the film, the power dynamic between them shifts – at times tender, at others agonising – exposing the deep fault lines of race, gender, class, and privilege. Their love story is both intoxicating and unsettling – a microcosm of the systems that shape—and constrain—our lives.
The film lingered long after the credits rolled, offering audiences plenty to dissect. It also lands at a particularly charged political moment, with the topic of the Mexican border being at the top of many days’ news agendas. Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency on the border, his ramping up of hardline immigration policies, and his stoking of division with racist rhetoric makes Dreams strikingly prescient and hard hitting, with Franco speaking to the urgency of now.
“It’s undeniably political,” Chastain stated in an interview. “If you look at how this country [the U.S.] was formed, it’s a country that has embraced the excellence of immigrants.” But with border crackdowns and mass deportations escalating, America’s already fraught relationship with immigration is under even greater strain.
For me, Dreams was one of the standouts of this year’s Berlinale competition – a powerful, prescient meditation on immigration, told through the deeply human lens of two people buckling under the weight of forces far larger than themselves.
Film Fest Report is an accredited media at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.
