I Dreamed His Name
(Colombia, 86 min.)
Dir. Angela Carabalí
Programme: International Spectrum (World premiere)
Angela Carabalí’s I Dreamed His Name begins, evocatively, with a landscape shot thrown askew by the lopping sound of an offscreen machete. The implied point-of-view belongs to the director’s father, Esau Carabalí, whose forced disappearance three decades prior irreversibly marked his seven-year-old daughter. Now, he appears to her in dreams, calling out from beyond and beckoning his kin to search for him. So begins the director’s “inevitable journey” toward the ghost of her father, with her sister Juliana along for the ride. They traverse the Colombian countryside in the direction of Cauca –– a province gripped by converging (and longstanding) sources of conflict and danger –– where Esau worked with the Nasa Indigenous population to protect and cultivate the land.
Esau is remembered and revived through various artifacts and testimonies. Principled and proud in equal measure, his widow describes him as restless, dignified, and rebellious. He challenged authority, starting unions wherever he went (and often getting fired for it), and wore his Afro-Colombian heritage like a badge of honour. These tributary passages are the film’s saving grace, buoying an otherwise confused and meandering project.
The opening stretch relies heavily on physical pieces of personal and cultural ephemera, with Carabalí’s hands tenderly arranging records, novels, drawings, albums, and snapshots –– a standout image sees an expanse of dry rice gradually pushed aside to reveal family photographs beneath. These planar viewpoints presage a flatness in both style and story. When the sisters begin their trek in earnest, I Dreamed His Name trades tactile memorabilia for landscapes viewed at a tentative distance, and this uneasy transition point is where it begins to lose the conceptual and stylistic force of those initial minutes.
Throughout this leg of the journey, the sisters are situated in the larger context of Colombia’s long, tragic history of forced disappearances. The most successful (and the most abstract) instance shows Esau’s portrait surrounded by rows of other photographs, which Carabalí flips over one by one to reveal their faces while recitations of their subjects’ names echo and overlap on the soundtrack, presumably voiced by relatives or loved ones, who, like the director remain haunted by the disappeared. The film’s aural design is rich and spacious, bringing depth to the film’s shakiest moments. There are several more compelling, standalone images –– a photo of father and daughter held underwater as a stream cascades across its surface, patterns of light shifting across the sisters’ clasped hands –– but they do little to disrupt the lulling flow of the film’s disappointingly linear path from point A to point B.
Carabalí’s camera has an abstract, discarnate relationship to nature (both appropriate and numbing), which becomes gradually more dynamic as the sisters become embedded with the region’s Indigenous guard. She also displays an awareness of this, however, describing a “mysticism” that she doesn’t have as a city-dweller and in turn establishing a productive tension in her gaze that comes too late to meaningfully effect what came before.
The film ends with a ceremony honouring the victims of these disappearances –– the perpetrators still unknown, but the survivors steadfast in their resolve to organize and unify. I Dreamed His Name never quite coheres its tangle of inquiries, discoveries, and reveries, but it remains admirably focused on the protection of lands, cultures, and labour rights –– an apt ode to everything Esau stood for.
