I chose to present Unlearning to Sleep within the frame of the Cinema of Disobedience
because the film embodies an approach that resists market-driven expectations. It is not
a work made to reassure or to neatly resolve; instead, it invites the spectator into a space
of slowness, vulnerability, and drift.
The film was awarded Best Film at the Berlin Porn Film Festival (BPFF), which for me
underlines its connection to an audience willing to engage with cinema outside
conventional categories. That recognition confirmed the value of small, alternative
communities that meet works where they are, without demanding that they disguise
themselves in order to circulate.
The film was shot at home, on a phone, during the pandemic. Its “homemade” condition is
not an accident but a decision: to embrace precarious means and the raw textures of low
resolution, instead of aspiring to high-definition polish. I knew this was the only way for
the project to exist: without resources, outside of film labs, and with no chance of ever
being supported by institutional funds. This awareness made it necessary to assume the
aesthetics of precariousness, not as a limitation, but as a different path to making cinema
possible.
Showing Unlearning to Sleep here is a way of aligning with the idea that cinema can
refuse to be formatted by the market before it is even created. It is an experiment in
softness, in letting go, which is in itself a form of disobedience. Instead of providing
answers or slogans, the film allows space for uncertainty, for drifting in and out of
attention, for daydreaming. It is less about provoking shock than about insisting on the
right to imagine otherwise—even if that imagining takes the fragile, porous form of a
dream.