Entre deux songes, Somewhere Between Sleep

It didn’t start as a story. It started with the actors and wanting to make something together before we knew precisely what it was. What we then kept circling around was anxiety — not the everyday kind everyone knows, but something closer to its pathological edge. The kind that doesn’t have a clean cause, that doesn’t resolve when the “problem” gets solved. I’m wary of films that treat anxiety as a plot device — something a character has until act three fixes it, but that’s not how it actually behaves in real life.

The actors, especially Lucia, brought in their own experiences of it, whatever that meant to them. Some of it came from real, difficult places, and I tried to be careful with that. None of it is exactly an authobiography, but none of it is invented from nothing either.

The harder problem was form. How do you film something that has no clear external shape? Anxiety is a silent terror, there’s nothing to point the camera at. So whatever steps came next, be it the writing, locations, or the rehearsals, my focus was on solving this. The story came after that, almost as scaffolding.

Lisa is the harder one to talk about, because so much of what she’s carrying doesn’t have a name on screen, even if in my head I think of it as an anxiety disorder. It’s loneliness, this sense of not belonging anywhere in particular, and then on top of that her life is changing in a big way. That combination makes her very fragile.

Anke is in her own kind of limbo, just a quieter version. She’s leaving a place she’s known her whole life, and there’s a lot of melancholy, maybe even grief. But her temperament goes in a different direction. She’s more able to look at uncertainty with calm. And I think that’s contagious in a small way. Not that she gives Lisa advice or fixes anything, it’s more that being near Anke brings Lucia courage.

The two of them meet by accident, and on paper it’s nothing extra special. But I think there’s a thing that happens when your own life is shifting under you: you start noticing other people who are also shifting and fragile, almost like a frequency you can suddenly hear. I think that’s what passes between them, even if neither one could explain it. So they spend an afternoon together, no real plan, just walking and talking, and for those few hours the weight both of them are carrying lifts. 

I think a place can’t really let you in on its own. It can sit there being beautiful or familiar or whatever, but it’ll keep you on the outside for as long as you want to stay there. What actually grants you access is people. And that’s what happens between Anke and Lisa that afternoon. Anke isn’t just showing her the town, she’s quietly handing over something. I think we all go through stretches like that, where you’re drifting, not really here, not really there, half-stuck in the past or future. And in those stretches, what pulls you back down to earth is rarely the place itself. It’s a person, a story, some small connection. And if you’re someone who’s suffering the way Lisa is, it doesn’t take a grand gesture to become very meaningful. A stranger being kind to you for twenty minutes can genuinely move something in you when you’re in that state. That’s a lot of what the film is trying to express — that things don’t need to be dramatic to matter.

It really started with Lucia. We’d worked together before, on another project, and a lot of her character ended up being shaped by her own life rather than the other way around. We met around the time she was opening her own clinic, which was a huge transition for her and she wanted to put some of that experience on screen. The same goes of my mother, Anke, who at the time was facing her own version of big change — leaving the Black Forest, where she’d lived for most of her life but which was never really her place in some deeper sense, to move to Berlin to finally be near her children. 

In terms of directing them, especially my mother, who isn’t a professional actress, everything had to be scripted down to the word and rehearsed properly. We stuck to a 30 page dialogue script. The film spends a lot of time on the first moments of their encounter, I consciously didn’t want to shy away from the initial small talk phase, maybe even awkwardness, as I feel that those first impressions of another person are so crucial and it’s when you forget the world around you. For Lucia, a professional actress, these scenes were maybe a bit different, as they were stripped of any drama.  We had a tiny crew, very little time, and it was freezing weather for most of the shoot. So everything stayed tightly controlled.

I’ve lived in this town for many years and wanted to portrait it as if it were a closed-off person. Probably because I’m still trying to figure out my own relationship to it. It’s a place we’re alien to at first, the way Lisa is alien to it, and that only opens up over time.

A lot of that comes from my own questions about belonging, having grown up there and never fully feeling settled in it. But I didn’t choose the town and a grim November setting to make a point about alienation. I think I wanted the opposite. I wanted to put it in a kind light, to give it a chance, and in some way make my own peace with the place by making this film about it.

And then there’s the forest surrounding it. Underneath the trees there’s this real sense of protection — the canopy closing over you. That’s been true for me since I was a kid growing up there, and I know it was true for my mother too. The forest is one of the few unambiguous things about that place and it gives you something.

The power of dreams is almost the engine of the whole film. When you’re dealing with anxiety — which again is the core of the film — something happens to the mind that I could describe as a kind of piercing. The membrane between what’s real and what’s underneath, your subconscious, gets thin, and things start leaking through. Unsettling feelings, half-formed dreams, they don’t stay contained in sleep anymore, they bleed into your waking hours.

And then the strange thing is, when you start to heal, it’s often the dreams that change first and settle. They get gentler and that’s a signal that something’s shifting underneath. So structurally I knew I needed two dreams that worked against each other — one genuinely unsettling, and then later, one that carries something more peaceful.

That’s actually where the title Somewhere Between Sleep comes from too. We’re all just drifting through places as visitors, with our fragile minds, and maybe the only place we’re ever fully home is in our sleep, in our dreams.

The dreams needed to feel different from the scenes anchored in reality, but not wildly so, as I just described. What mattered a lot was a sense of movement at the right moments. Even the unsettling dream had to keep shifting, keep progressing so that we never felt too stuck in it. That movement is a contrast with the daytime town scenes, which I shot with a closed-off background, very little horizon, almost claustrophobic in that sense. The dreams were the place where things could open up a bit, where there was more space and more sky.

And to keep the porousness between what’s dream and reality, I played with slow motion, some AI-assisted material, actual burned film, some rawness and imperfection. 

We used the same camera, the same lens, the same film stock as on Wood And Water. I liked the idea of continuity rather than starting from zero— there’s a kind of relationship you build with a format.

And then simply because analog film has a soul. And if the unsettling subconscious underneath the film is a disturbing ai dream sequence, that soul shines even more.