Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda’s startling Tales of Two Who Dreamt is a gloriously bizarre mixture of fiction and documentary filmmaking. Set in a rundown housing block in Toronto, it depicts the hard scrabble life of a Roma family waiting to get their immigration papers from Canadian authorities. Shot in black and white, one might assume that the film’s aesthetic would be downbeat and grim. While there are certainly tough moments, that’s not the case at all.
 
Instead, we see that the family, and eventually some of their friends, have been hired to appear in a film. There are scenes of the family—father, mother, one boy and an older and younger daughter—rehearsing episodes that are sometimes shot and sometimes not. Stories are recounted, and often repeated, about bizarre incidents, such as a dog being abandoned in an apartment and left to starve, and most intriguingly, a boy waking up to find that he’s been transformed into a bird.
 
Roma culture is evoked through songs and crazy, lengthy parties. The poverty of new immigrants is shown as the family attempts to rent out a room to three lads. Football—or as Canadians call it, “soccer”—is played on the block and even in the hallways of the very gritty apartment building. Perhaps most interesting is the strange case of the boy, who may be the one who turns into a bird, only he appears quite human to us. Is this a metaphor for the changing identity of immigrants who have to reinvent themselves in a new country?
 
Tales of Two Who Dreamt is a unique and compelling film. You’ve never seen the immigrant experience in Canada depicted this way before. By blending documentary with tall tales and a film-within-a-film, Bussman and Pereda have made a must-see hybrid.
 

Marc Glassman
Editor, POV Magazine