1 hr 53 minutes
Set on a 100 year old farmhouse turned college coop, Of Dreams and Dust is a psychedelic, hypnotic documentary thrusting the viewer directly into the anxious spiraling of college students on the precipice of graduation. With their phones, wits, and constant access to self-reflexivity, the students steer the film through absurdist turbulence. The resulting narrative wavers between senseless foolishness, metaphysical anxiety, somber mourning of the passage of time, and an earnest mysticism for the nature of being.
‘Of Dreams and Dust’ emerged from the transitional period between COVID lockdown and the reopening of society. Shot almost entirely on phones by the students themselves (including myself), their compulsive self-documentation and reflexivity became the film’s formal engine. This film explores the phenomenology of a distinctly American moment: the last slice of communal living before entering a collapsing job market. The result is the complete disintegration of the boundaries between filmmaker and subject, document and performance, foolishness and metaphysical inquiry.
Reese's Films 