The Dreaming House

The catalyst for this dreamlike house is a juxtaposition of elements that come together in the most banal way: Keith Lock’s father pushes the stroller of the filmmaker's youngest child across the street from the dilapidated house where he was born. Three generations come together in a single shot, followed by a shot of the sun rising, of a flower blooming. “Life is sweet,” murmurs Keith Lock’s voice, as he wonders whether existence itself might be a dream from which we ultimately awaken in death. Here, as elsewhere in his approach dedicated to excavating memory, the filmmaker is fascinated by the aesthetics of the trace, as he films individuals in the process of becoming a memory, while the narration explains that in every encounter, in every gesture, there may already be a dream in the making. From one narrative leap to the next, what Lock explores behind this dilapidated house is ultimately the historicity of the foreign father who was nevertheless born here, the one who blends into the landscape like the house, and whose trace endures in this family memory and in all those where his presence is inscribed. Finally, the shot that set everything in motion reappears, and this time we may notice more clearly a young couple in the background, pushing their stroller in the opposite direction, in a strange and poetic symmetry. The film’s loop closes within that of another family trace that does not belong to the Lock clan but is sketched out for the duration of a single shot. The house of dreams turns out to be as much a memory of family life as it is a discreet witness to that of others, a point of reference.

Mathieu Li-Goyette
Film critic, programmer, researcher
and editor-in-chief of Panorama-cinéma

Presented in collaboration with