Fever Dream

Making this film has been a reflection on uncertainty, mortality, and grief, and an effort to connect over these difficult emotions as we process the effects of a years-long pandemic and start reconnecting with 'normal life.'

In late 2020, my team and I at Doha Film Institute were engaged in running our annual Documentary Lab led by the accomplished Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. The coronavirus pandemic forced us to stay home, and we adapted to a virtual format. Very quickly, the lines between work and life became blurred. Halfway through the workshop, my husband and I contracted the virus. We were transported to a Qatar government isolation facility. The fact that it was a five-star hotel further confused our sense of reality. At first, we filmed things just to process the strange experience and to share it with our families. As we became accustomed to cohabitating with the virus, the quarantine hotel suite became my office and conversations with Rithy, my team, and the participating filmmakers encouraged us to turn our experience into a documentary. In this way, 'Fever Dream' became a de facto Doc Lab project—like much of 2020, unplanned and unexpected. It took me a long time to edit this film, most of 2021 in fact, and the process became an external dialogue between the difficult emotions that came up in the last two years as well as an exercise of processing and letting go.