On the quest for Kel, the femme trio leaves Brooklyn for Pittsburgh, then Iowa City, then Kansas City, all while calculating where they can safely stop for rest and food. They opt to patronize Black-owned restaurants, but then reach stretches of the country where there isn’t such an option for hundreds of miles.
A cinematic cartographer, Ford leverages the supposed romance of the American open-road movie to complicate the applicability of that feeling for Z, Lauren, and Tasha. Questions of safety and belonging snake through the narrative like the winding highway systems the friends traverse. As Ira writes, “Shatara doesn’t reinvent the road trip drama, she expands it to include people who have always been part of America’s roads. So much that they made their own maps.”
With the inciting missing-person plot and Ford’s meditations on place, it may come as no surprise that Dreams in Nightmares was inspired by a certain Wim Wenders classic. “I wanted to make a Black queer Paris, Texas,” Ford explains. “On one level, because of it being this very, very, very iconic American thing. But also it’s about people who are defining and searching for home and belonging.”
We come to find that, like Kel, these three friends left their own rigid, familial enclaves to pursue affinity in the expensive cities that have long magnetized alienated artists: Los Angeles and NYC. Therein, Dreams in Nightmares illustrates the sacred acts not only of choosing family but also of concocting one’s own conception of home.
During our conversation, Ford speaks about belonging, begrudgingly, to the US. “As an indigenous African American who has lived abroad and has always been asked the question, ‘Where are you from?’ I say, ‘America.’ And then they say, ‘No, but where are you really from?’ And I have to explain. This has been the prevailing narrative of my identity, that I don’t belong anywhere.”
Ford continues: “As I’ve moved through the world and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to accept that I do belong somewhere and it’s here… [The question is] how do I create a home with those things that encompass all of those truths, the bad things and the good things.”