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“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
#image_title 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 Forum sidebar. Sure, the story might be powered by conflict, starting as it does with the death of a well-digger in an apparent ethnic skirmish. But Dreaming isn’t particularly interested in geographical or historical specificities. Instead, it charts the aftermath of that senseless murder, tracking a soldier (Davit Beybutyan) hired by the departed’s family to drive the late man’s daughter Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan) away from danger. If that sounds fairly linear, the film itself is everything but.
Written and directed by Haroutounian, Dreaming unspools as a concatenation of scenes unmoored in time or space. As Davit and Veronika drive toward an unknown destination, rubbing shoulders with all sorts of shell-shocked drifters, sounds and visuals amplify their dislocation. Cinematographer Evgeny Rodin heightens that feeling shooting with a separate lens held in front of the camera, resulting in a dizzying focus that leaves parts of the frame blurred while literalizing the couple’s growing disassociation. Time speeds and slows in strange ways, like an inebriated clock; in the film’s longest sequence, Haroutounian finds Davit and Veronika at a mass wedding, their love and celebrations soon giving way to military choreographies. “The war will never end,” a voice grimly prophesies at the start; by the time Haroutounian’s auspicious debut wraps, the conflict has metastasized into a state of mind, turning two lovers into phantoms adrift in a world of perturbing visions.
Filmmaker: There’s a major difference between films that try to merely ape a dreamlike aesthetic and others that unfurl like a dream. After Dreaming belongs squarely to the latter camp, and I’d love to start by asking you how you went about conjuring its free-flowing logic.
Haroutounian: I didn’t want to fall back on preconceived ideas around the aesthetic of a dream. I’m sure you could come up with all sorts of ways to make a film look like one, like drenching everything in a particular tinge or summoning a funhouse effect. It’s not enough to make a series of beautiful visuals, because anyone can do that and you are still on the outside of those images. I wanted to make something from the inside—call it inside-out filmmaking rather than outside-in. I think that’s why I hate so many films these days; it’s as if there was a barrier that makes it impossible for me to enter them. I can’t get beyond this artifice, the suspension of disbelief is hard for me. Creating that unfurling you speak of, where it’s more of an experience you’re absorbed in, that’s a much harder thing to achieve. There’s no formula. It’s about being as open and vulnerable as possible while on set, to what’s unfolding before your eyes, and following what’s fulfilling and exciting.
Filmmaker: In a film that’s full of ravishing images, I wonder if there was one in particular that set everything in motion. Where and how did After Dreaming begin?
Haroutounian: Neptune! [laughs]. In astrology, that’s the planet of delusion, addiction, deception and the subconscious. It’s connected to a profound desire to disappear. I don’t know how familiar you are with the planet, but it has this brilliant shade of blue—the color and texture are so magnetizing and hypnotic. You never actually see Neptune in the film, you never hear anyone talk about it. And yet, more than any subject or theme, in the end it all came down to this sensation of being enveloped by and fully giving yourself to something—the trust and danger that come with going to a place you don’t entirely know.
Filmmaker: But how did you move from this initial feeling to the actual script? How did your writing unfold?
Haroutounian: I’m very influenced by place. I spent two years location scouting all over Armenia, and being there was a major force that fueled many of the ideas in the film. There’s this late scene, for instance, where we follow Claudette as she roams a rural village. She glides past two cars, each blasting its own track, and the two songs clash into each other. That’s something I experienced myself, in that same village where I was staying and writing the script. I asked the villagers what songs they were playing, and we used the same exact ones in the film. Lots of things came from direct life experience.
As for the actual writing, I kind of despise screenplays… [laughs]. I love writing, but it’s such a burden to translate visuals in a written form. With the script of After Dreaming, I was quite precious about finding the perfect descriptions. But once we started filming, I threw out most of the script and rewrote the dialogues right before we’d shoot. The screenplay, in a way, was irrelevant: I had internalized the film so deeply at that point that I was pretty much live-editing it in my head as we kept shooting. I didn’t have a long script to begin with, around sixty pages, but I still threw away half of it because the material read as information. It soon became very clear that when something felt like pure narrative, pure information, it just didn’t fit into the work. It was almost like a self-rejecting entity. Whatever would try to force its way back into this realm of story in the most traditional sense looked like it was coming from a completely different film. There’s a big difference between a film full of libidinal experiences and a film that is a dutiful illustration of the script.
With World, my previous short, I thought I had my process down. I shot-listed everything front to back and left nothing to chance. I was doing that with After Dreaming too—I could still project the original plan in my head in such great detail, because I was watching the film over and over before shooting even began. But as soon as we started, I realized my plans weren’t working. I’d never found myself in that position. So, instead of trying to force these preexisting plans into the film, I decided to allow myself the freedom to direct myself in real time, but nothing was random. I think people confuse this type of filmmaking with… well, I’m not Terrence Malick! [laughs] I’m a total formal fascist, for lack of a better word. I may not be able to describe exactly what it is that I want going into a scene, but once it begins, I know if it’s working or what I need to do to make sure it does.
Filmmaker: That reminds me of the strong divide between filmmakers who prefer to exercise complete control over their shoots, who seldom stray from their scripts, and others that might be more open to improvisation, to the unexpected. Where do you situate yourself between the two sides?
Haroutounian: That’s the thing: I am a total control freak, I have strong opinions and I can’t hide how I feel. I can’t pretend that something’s working when it’s not. It really has to have its own life force. It’s almost like this vital energy that chooses me. I go back to a concept by Roland Barthes, the punctum, this idea that something hyper-subjective can jump at you and puncture your eye. If something doesn’t connect to me, it’s like my eyeballs slip off the screen, whereas here I was going with this very physical approach, which meant that when something was working I could feel it in my body. That physicality was the only truth I held on to, my only barometer. Gradually everyone else on set began to tune into that same feeling, until they could understand when a shot had a life force, when it was dead or when it was just okay.
We threw away a few days of shooting, because at the beginning nothing was right. We were using an anamorphic lens, with this gorgeous old Russian glass, but it was such a cumbersome process—I felt like I was dying trying to get some simple shots, so we had to start again and used this camera I had brought with me to Armenia. I had my DP bring a backup photo lens to set. We held it in front of the camera, and I instantly felt this incredible rush; it was like, “This is where we’re going. This is Neptune.” That was the approach we used throughout. Whenever something felt too didactic, we’d excise it. We got good footage that takes place in a bus during the wedding, but it looked like it was coming from a different production, another universe. It felt dishonest, so it got cut.
Filmmaker: I’d love to hear, in practical terms, how you achieved that fuzzy focus. You said your cinematographer held a separate lens in front of the camera. Could you elaborate?
Haroutounian: In the end it was a totally digital process, but I like to think of After Dreaming as if it was a handcrafted film; my DP had to hold this lens, disembodied from the camera and was pulling focus most of the time by moving his hand ever so slightly. I’d give him directions as we were shooting each shot. It was a challenge to articulate these images at first, but it soon became a very intuitive language between us. I don’t think I could recreate the film if I tried—it was a series of one-of-a-kind moments. Every film is like that, in a way, but it was especially true for this. Sometimes we couldn’t even rack focus the way I wanted. Our hands, our bodies, and the images themselves were pushed to their physical limit. It was intense, but it was also effortless. What made its way into the final cut had a sense of flow. I was never surprised by the clips I ended up using in the edit, I rarely had to scrub through the footage. Every time I was like, “I know it’s this shot,” because I remembered that punctum on set. It made me feel very vindicated to re-experience the same energy through those shots many months later, when I was cutting the film.
Filmmaker: What’s most fascinating about this blurry effect is that it seems to upend the visual hierarchies of your shots; you never really know what you should focus on. There’s a disorienting feel to that. What was the rationale behind that decision?
Haroutounian: Anti-reason. I wanted to leave my rational mind behind. I’ve been to art school, I’ve been to film school and I wanted to forget all of that and have the camera be as dumb as possible. I didn’t want the camera to hit the typical beats you’d expect at a particular moment–I immediately rejected cinema logic. It was about taking the material world and using it to exalt the spirit behind everything. It was never an intention to do things for the sake of being different. I simply wanted to play, to remember my body in the ether of time. It all goes back to this seduction of disappearing, of dissolving the mind and not understanding where I begin and you end.
Filmmaker: Did you have a storyboard you could fall back on?
Haroutounian: No, the storyboarding was all in my head. My producer would often joke that every day on set was like some kind of livestream of the inner workings of my mind [laughs]. Which requires a profound level of trust and vulnerability on behalf of all my collaborators, especially my DP, who in any given moment didn’t necessarily know what would happen next. I used the fundamentals of production to ground ourselves: “This is the quality of light that I want.” But if there was too much resistance in achieving a shot, I would stop wasting our time and say, “Look, we’re trying too hard. Let’s pause and sit in this space for a minute.” I don’t like it when I’m crowded by too many people, it’s overstimulating. I absorb everything on set; it’s essential but uncomfortable to be sensitive. Most of the time I would ask people to clear the room, just so that I could orient myself in the space, without any setups or clutter, then we would bring in the camera and adjust things from there. My sound designers had plenty of my speaking to cut out, because articulating these images was of primary importance to me, or else they’d become anonymous, made by anyone. I’d spend a lot of time setting up the compositions so they would all fuse together. There was plenty of spontaneity, but everything had to form into a cohesive whole. Each shot tightly built on the other, or else the film would fall apart in a bad way.
Filmmaker: Sounds are subject to the same blurring as your visuals. One of the most powerful sequences, for me, was an early traveling shot that leaves us gliding past a monument as a chant becomes louder and clearer: Free! Independent! Could you speak about the role that sounds and their distortions play in the film?
Haroutounian: I used a lot of on-set sounds—wild sounds I asked my recorders to capture where we were shooting, or in areas immediately around it, in nature. It was important to incorporate the true textures of the locations. I cut the film with the sound off, because I would constantly hear my voice giving instructions to my DP or actors. The edit only truly came to life once I incorporated that first draft of sound and started layering things to make something organic and rich, but not like cinema sound. I wanted my sound designers to push very minimal and natural elements as far as possible; I wanted to bask in these sensual details as if that’s the score. As for the chant you mention, that was always in the script, and we got the soldiers you see immediately prior to that shot to chant it on set. It was a cathartic moment for them to speak these words when we have felt so helpless as a nation lately. The quote itself references the quest of statehood in modern Armenian history. Themes of independence are often in our songs. Above all that though, it was inspired by my personal compulsion to be free.
Filmmaker: Unless I’m mistaken, your two leads, Veronika Poghosyan and Davit Beybutyan, didn’t have any acting experience prior to After Dreaming. How did you happen into them? And when did you realize they’d be a perfect fit for Claudette and Atom?
Haroutounian: Neither had ever acted in a film before, it’s true. But I didn’t cast thinking that the actors I’d hire would have to play someone who’d be radically different from who they were in real life. Their presence was enough for me to know they had lots of similarities to the characters they’d play. I first saw Davit on Instagram making black comedy sketches. He caught my eye, and I asked my casting director to bring him in. At first I thought he’d play one of the grooms in the wedding sequence, but he insisted to audition for the lead role specifically. I thought that was something Atom himself would do. He radiated this swagger, he had a certain masculinity, a kind of unspeakable charisma that few men carry these days. You either have it or you don’t.
Veronika was also new to acting and I had an immediate response to her energy. We didn’t do any rehearsals. I remember Veronika emailing me: “What should I do to prepare? What’s this character’s psychology?” And I was like, “Nothing. There’s no psychology. You’re not playing someone that far from you; you’re enough.” It was more about instilling a sense of trust. Her way of speaking, her face, that’s who the character was. I didn’t need to contort them. We worked a bit on things like intonation, pacing, some basic blocking while we shot. They are both perceptive and smart, I had confidence I could steer them wherever I needed them to go.
Filmmaker: You worked with Brad Becker-Parton and Carlos Reygadas, who served as producer and executive producer respectively. How did you cross paths with them? And how involved were they in the film?
Haroutounian: Brad first reached out after he read my profile on Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He watched World and had an instant connection to the film. He got on board with After Dreaming pretty much from the first time we spoke, around the post-lockdown era—I didn’t meet him in person until a couple of years into the project. We tried to raise funds and situate this as a European co-production, with no luck. He put me in touch with great people, and his support was invaluable. He believed in the vision and artistry of the film, regardless of the responses we would get from the industry. Just knowing that there was someone who wasn’t Armenian—who had never been to the country, as a matter of fact—and yet had this profound belief in the film was absolutely helpful.
I finally met him in New York at the tail end of a meeting with potential financiers, where I was told, once again, to reach out “for your next film.” That’s when I decided I’d totally slash the budget, and came up with a figure I thought I could raise through my inner circle. In two days, we accomplished what we tried to do in two years. Brad was a great guide throughout the whole journey. He was never limiting; he knew how high the stakes were for me.
As for Carlos, I just emailed him! [laughs] I knew he’d executive produced films from Georgia and Azerbaijan, so once I wrapped the shoot, I wrote and asked him if he wanted to add Armenia to complete the trifecta. I always wanted to do post-production at his Splendor Omnia studios out in Mexico. He saw a rough cut of the film but didn’t provide input on a creative level; he was just a big fan. Him and everyone at Splendor ensured I’d make the best film possible regardless of financial or time limitations. We’re great friends now; we have a real kinship. And his passion for After Dreaming—a film that in many ways was so impossible to make—was truly meaningful to me.
Filmmaker: I hope you won’t mind me asking this, but I wonder what it felt like for you, a member of the Armenian diaspora, to return to the country and make a film in such troubled times, with the conflict with Azerbaijan still very much ongoing.
Haroutounian: To be clear: I don’t consider this a war film. I never engineered these themes—I was focusing on my specific life context. Much of contemporary Armenian cinema seems to have fallen under the burden of education and representation. But I’m not a historian, I’m not a politician, I’m not a mascot. This desperation to teach people about what’s going on in Armenia comes from a noble place, of course. But when this is our constant cultural focus, we become more like relics of history and exclude ourselves from the universalities of being alive on this planet. I’m working within my direct context to talk about life, not have an agenda.
Making a film in the shadow of war was very difficult, but I can’t compare my problems with those of people from war-torn areas like Karabakh, where families have been ripped apart, where fathers, sons, and children have been obliterated into nothingness by drones. On top of trying to make a film in this abysmal cultural climate and wrestling with this cowardly film industry, we were grappling with all sorts of existential questions. Will there be an invasion? Will there be full-frontal war? Will Armenia still exist? I had even thought of moving the whole project to the States and filming there, an Armenian film set in the US, because I was just so rattled by the ethnic cleansing we were witnessing. There were areas of Armenia I decided we would never travel to, parts that are only 45 minutes away from the capital, where people still live with the fear that snipers might kill them at any moment. That’s happened to farmers as well as random people driving their cars. We’re not talking about military targets, but innocent civilians.
Being part of the diaspora, having this history of genocide loom over you, it’s kind of a disease; I refer to it as “genocide brain.” It unlocks this totally abject reality in both conceptual and personal terms. You viscerally understand the wildest possibilities of life; you’re always anticipating a catastrophe, that justice will forever fail us. I have family in Armenia. My best friends are there. I have my citizenship. If war were to break out, my cousins would get drafted. As we were filming and traveling the country, we were also wrestling with a more logistical question: How would we get out in case of an invasion? Where would we go? No one had any answers. Looking back at the shoot now, it really was a “now or never” moment. I couldn’t wait until next winter because we wouldn’t know what state the country would be in, how the region could change from Putin’s war and another Trump presidency. But we have to show up. People still live there, and pretend life goes on like normal. In the end you need to make the decision: this is where we come from, and we cannot abandon our home.
