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Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Dreams Rewired traces the anxieties and cravings of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years, when film, television and the telephone were new.
“Best Documentary at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015” — De Recensie, Amsterdam
A tour de force, of archive clips supported by Tilda Swinton’s hypnotic voiceover and a treasure trove of footage culled from hundreds of films, Dreams Rewired traces the anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back a century. Early forms of mass media sparked a fervent idealism in the public imagination – promising total communication, the annihilation of distance and even an end to war. But then, too, fears existed over the erosion of privacy, security and morality proved to be well-founded.
Using excerpts from fiction films, slapstick comedies, political newsreels, advertisements and scientific experiments, co-directors Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode unearth material that is by turns hilarious, revelatory, beautiful and prescient. Combined with Swinton’s whispered narration and a virtuosic score by Siegfried Friedrich this film forges a powerful connection between contemporary viewers and their idealistic forbearers of a century ago.