A phantom ride through real dreams, where political reality bleeds into the deepest sleep.
Library of Dreams is made up out of real dreams, gathered from 1930s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Russia since it invaded Ukraine. This surreal journey allows you to experience what it feels like when totalitarianism seeps into our private spheres. The visuals are reminiscent of Metropolis, The Great Dictator and Soviet propaganda posters; a dream from 1936 Berlin, replaying in your Amsterdam headset in 2026, is truly a ‘ghost in the feed’, tapping into this year’s main festival theme perfectly – and following up on last year’s theme, 1984: ReImagined. Our dreams are the very first feed, a channel nobody controls, where the things a regime tries to suppress get transmitted anyway.
You drift through the dreams of ordinary people living in three authoritarian regimes: a child in the Third Reich, a peasant in the Soviet Union under Stalin, a woman in today’s Russia. As they sleep, the state creeps into their most private moments, exposing suppressed fears both tender and monstrous.
