Dreams of Dust

Dreams of Dust, described by the maker as an x-ray photograph of the human soul, is an aesthetic, poetic film about the fantasy world of a truck driver. The film is literally a dream of dust and an exceptional and radiant film in its emphatically unrealistic approach to the `story’. The wind blows over the dry fields. A vibration appears on the shaky horizon. A couple of rusty pieces of metal shine in the sun. An old truck, more like a wreck, comes closer. Ousta is a middle-aged driver -his hair blows in the wind. At his side we see 10-year-old Omid, a boy with crystal clear eyes, and the young woman Maliheh as she rocks backwards and forwards to the incessant movements of the track. Their lives seem to be linked together by a chance past. A past in which there was a terrible traffic accident. That is the beginning of a film about the peregrinations of three people, who share a joint fate. This road movie through Iran does not really have a story; the maker only wanted to portray the people’s roaming and their inner journey. There is also no hint as to what is dream and what is real; Farsi uses the drought of the Iranian desert and the sparse dialogues to accentuate this. The slightly surrealistic soundtrack also occasionally contributes to the alienating presence of these three travellers among the living.