Redreaming Us

How can one write love with images? How do you describe your love life without a single word? Is it even possible? Can we redream our lives? Can we gaze upon the edge of our lives and come back unharmed?

Making this short film, I attempted to squeeze a lifetime into less than 8 minutes, which is almost the length of your final breath on earth. It is like those famous stories of the dead who returned to life after watching their Life's Movie screened backwards in something like a dark tunnel with a light at the end, which could be the light of eternity, or perhaps the light of disappointment.

When my partner contracted cancer, I felt like the dead who sit in front of what used to be their lives, running the circle of life backwards for fear they might not bid proper farewell as they part with the people they loved, the pets they raised, the vistas in their windows, the sensations and emotions that filled their lives with joy, sadness, and hope, with the visions that filled their days, and with their dreams.

And so, I found myself redreaming the first time we met in a Tel Aviv gay park, remembering how I searched for hookups in public toilets, in hourly rooms I rented to screw with men I cannot remember, men who were mere collections of organs, sexual organs, with desires that were never truly satisfied. I relived our hikes and picnics, our love that our garden in a Carmel Mountain village still reflects at me. Perhaps it was a Paradise Lost for which we yearned, for which we shall always long, and to which we’ll forever escape. Our love is reflected in flowers and bushes and trees, in birds and field mice, which actually are tiny gifts of life for which we often forget to thank, eventually regretting.

I may have succeeded, or not, but that's my love story: It is not the most perfect one, it has no punchline, but such is life - forever flowing. Still, it is my story, our story, that I'm redreaming.