Tales of Two Who Dreamt (2016)

Drifting between fiction and documentary, Tales of Two Who Dreamt follows a family of Hungarian Roma (Gypsy) asylum seeking refugees living in a large apartment complex in Toronto. The film follows their everyday life routines and also ventures into the character's' hopes and dreams. Constructed through characters and the building's corporeal landscape, we drift with various members of the family through spaces and people suffering the effects of displacement and disconnection in their hope to build a sense of community in a foreign space. The film tells the several different tales: a woman who went crazy after her son fell of a balcony, an abandoned dog locked in an apartment, a fire that burned an entire floor in the building, an enormous snake that escaped and was never found, a child that turned into a bird, among other stories. Tales of Two Who Dreamt is set in a housing block in Toronto. A Roma refugee family is hired as actors to work on a fiction film. Instead of the fiction film, we see them rehearsing stories of their past and the building inhabitants, and Kafka's Metamorphosis, while reflecting on their upcoming hearing concerning their residency status. These stories are spun into legends, whereby the boundaries between reality and fiction, and the documented and the performed no longer apply. The film deals with representation and self-representation, along with important issues of translation and subtitling.