Friday, April 10, 2026 at 4:30 PM to Friday, April 10, 2026 at 6:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LA Festival of Movies presents *After Dreaming*, by director Christine Haroutounian. 105 minutes, Armenia/USA/Mexico, 2025. North American Premiere. Co-presented by the Armenian Film Society. Q&A with writer/director Christine Haroutounian. ∆ *Armenia, before peace yet after war. A soldier is asked to take a girl on a road trip to keep her father's death a secret from her.* The debut feature by Armenian-American filmmaker Christine Haroutounian is a marvel of transcendental style, a trance-inducing portrait of contemporary Armenia that evokes the the elliptical and hallucinatory films of Claire Denis and Carlos Reygadas (an executive producer) while defiantly creating its own grammar. In the aftermath of an unnamed war, a soldier (Davit Beybutyan) is sent by a family to take their daughter (Veronika Poghosyan) under his wing, while withholding the news that her father has been mistakenly killed. Traveling on the road, the couple are intimately drawn to each other as they drift through the war-torn landscape. Never resorting to easy metaphors, Haroutounian's film feels both intuitive and ritualistic in the depiction of a culture, culminating in a mesmerizing extended wedding sequence that is a work of pure cinema. -MG In Armenian with English subtitles. Prior Screenings: 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (Forum)