‘Somniloquies - Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor’

Somniloquies is a descent into the dream-world of our unconscious.

A wild orgy, a mass drowning, a dwarf city for rent, a surgical operation gone tragically awry—such were the surreal nocturnal dramas of the world’s most prolific sleep-talker. Dion McGregor, an American lyricist dreaming of Broadway, spoke his dreams aloud while his New York roommate Mike Barr recorded them over seven years in the 1960s. Somniloquies explores the full spectrum of human emotion, unfiltered by waking inhibition, as a floating camera glides imperceptibly across naked sleeping bodies, from contour to orifice, from one dreamer to the next.

Véréna Paravel is a filmmaker, visual anthropologist, and artist. From 2006 to 2023, she collaborated with Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Together, they made Leviathan, Somniloquies, Caniba, and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Venice 2023, Special Jury Prize), creating bold, non-anthropocentric cinema. Their work has been shown at major festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, etc.), and in institutions such as MoMA, the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, the Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern.