For Those That Watch Me Dream

“For Those That Watch Me Dream” is a semi-autobiographical film about young actors and filmmakers in Bombay. It’s about a time in my life when the proverbial ‘dream’ started to take on far more colours. The dream I saw other people obsessed with was to perform, however, it rarely ended with the audition, with the shoot. The performance spilled over into their personal life, their interpersonal relationships. The dream was consuming them. What happens, therefore, when the dream itself becomes a crucible of performance, a stage. Who are you performing for in your dreams?
The film was constructed from scenes shot over the course of three years using real actors filmed in their downtime, having conversations that, to me, describe their real life hopes, dreams, ambitions and relationships. It isn’t the classical Bollywoodisation of an actor’s life in Bombay that shows the cliched producer-actor grind. It’s about the dingy apartments where they meet, where they bare their souls, where they perform themselves, their intimacy. Capturing their lived-in reality through an absurdist lens was the only way I knew to investigate their story. To be true about what could only be described as inherently untrue.
The film sprawls itself out in an overlapping fashion bringing the various threads that makeup the protagonist’s hope and anxiety and bring them in conflict with not just other actors, casting directors and partners but also with the directors who control them and the audience that validates them beyond the fourth wall.
“For Those That Watch Me Dream” is a character study of a woman driven to the brink and back in pursuit of her ‘dream’ of becoming an actor told through the perspective of her dreams and waking life... provided one can tell the difference.