Scottish premieres
Followed by a conversation between guest curator Anahit Ghazaryan and filmmaker Christine Haroutounian

Wheelchair accessible* | In Armenian; with English subtitles
Pay-what-you-can tickets (£4 / £7 / £10)

If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.

“I often find myself lost in a reality whose coordinates keep shifting. Political transformations, wars, new economic relations, and the changing balance of power in the world make it difficult to know where to stand, what to believe, or even how to understand what is happening. Perhaps being lost is no longer something to overcome, but a place to inhabit.
Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming and Vahan Khachatryan’s Kafka enter this space from very different directions.
After Dreaming lives in a place where certainty keeps receding. The war is there and not there. A dream comes and goes, appearing just long enough to pull you into it before slipping away again. A landscape becomes a memory, a memory becomes a present, a body becomes a question. Nothing settles into one meaning for long.
And yet you keep following. Not because the film promises an answer, but because something in it can be felt before it can be understood. It is a cinema of instinct, where the things that escape language begin to speak in another way.
Kafka comes from the strange distance between a person and the life they are living. Emptiness, absurdity, estrangement - the feeling of being there without quite being there. Perhaps not feeling is not the opposite of feeling, but its aftermath. And around us, the world keeps offering shapes to inhabit, while something inside them remains hollow.
Two films moving through different forms of disorientation. Two ways of losing the familiar coordinates, and of staying with what remains when they are gone.”

Content notes: war, grief, loss, trauma

Access notes: slightly out-of-focus cinematography

Curated by Guest Curator Anahit Ghazaryan

* Please note, The Lower Hall at the Pyramid at Anderston is wheelchair accessible through a ramp at a side entrance. There are 9 steps between the level where it is located and the rest of the venue, meaning that to make way to the accessible toilet or other parts of the building, wheelchair users will need to re-enter via the main entrance. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.