27/04/2021 - Andrea Pellerani’s film transports us to a dreamlike, nigh-on deserted island where Nature is slowly taking back what once was hers

Like a picture postcard sent from the future, Dreaming An Island, which was presented in a world premiere within the Visions du Réel Festival’s National Competition, seems to offer a glimpse of what the future could hold for us, should Nature decide to take back what is rightfully hers. In this sense, Ikeshima Island in Japan, which is the protagonist of Ticinese director Andrea Pellerani’s latest film, serves as an example, or rather a laboratory in which the consequences of a hypothetical reversal of power between men and Nature can be duly assessed. What would happen if the consumerist frenzy enveloping us suddenly disappeared? And what if the weapons we use to impose our will onto the spaces which welcome us, likewise stopped working? These are just a couple of the questions pondered by Dreaming An Island, a work which catapults us into a world that’s both dreamlike and post-apocalyptic.

The story of Ikeshima Island, which Pellerani discovered almost by accident while travelling in Japan, brings together the past, the present and the future. This results in a sense of timelessness which leaves a deep mark on the film and lends it an almost ethereal quality, like a leaf fluttering on the breeze without any specific sense of direction, yet aware of its own existence. In a little over twenty years, the population of the island, mostly composed of coal miners (and their families), has fallen from ten thousand to less than a hundred individuals, a change caused by the closure of the mine which was judged too expensive (and likely very unsafe) when compared to other extraction methods, and which, in less than one year, has transformed Ikeshima into a ghost town. It’s a level of decline which, from an anthropocentric viewpoint at least, highlights the unscrupulousness of men’s power over Nature. Why does Ikeshima, with its abandoned bars, restaurants, houses and buildings, stir up so much nostalgia within us? Why does silence and the impossibility of controlling Nature, which is expanding so immeasurably, fill us with so much fear? What if the frenzy to which our consumerist society is enslaved has taken over to such an extent that our essential connection with the land which accommodates us, has been broken?

Without ever sliding into a treaty, Dreaming An Island urges us to face up to our demons; it obliges us to open our eyes to the future, or at least a possible future. Marked by a dual perspective – that of the older inhabitants who remember the past with fondness, and that of the (few) younger people: the school’s only two pupils and their very many teachers who shoulder the absurdity of their present-day situation as if it were perfectly normal – Dreaming An Island places personal connections at the heart of its story. Material possessions are slowly deteriorating, but the strong ties between the few remaining inhabitants - and between the latter and the very many cats on the island - help the small and nigh-on utopian community to survive. And what if, ultimately, “normality” was only an artefact of our minds? The film transports us far, far away from our consumerist habits to a lawless and timeless, dreamlike world, an island caught between a yearning for the comfort of past habits and curiosity for a future dominated by Nature as she tends to needs which have been smothered for too long.

Dedicated to the memory of Tiziana Soudani, Dreaming An Island is produced by Amka Films Production together with RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera, and is sold worldwide by Russia’s Antidote Sales.

(Translated from Italian)