In their sophomore feature, Dreams in Nightmares, writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford encourages us to think beyond how we conceptualise the act of movement, a privilege that not everyone holds. Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère), who are both middle-class individuals let go from their jobs at the start of the film, decide to take a car with their friend Lauren (Dezi Bing)—a trans poet—to search for Kel (Mars Storm Rucker)—another mutual friend—who has mysteriously gone missing. The group of Black queer femmes, as the film says, thus begins a road trip across the midwestern USA to figure out what happened to their friend, challenged personally along the way before its pseudo-utopic end. The film premiered at BlackStar Film Festival and vied for the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award before playing most recently at the 2025 edition of Inside Out: Toronto 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival. Ford’s debut feature from 2019, Test Pattern, also premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival.
Ford implicitly acknowledges the relative economic privilege of their characters—a professor and consultant, in the case of Z and Tasha—while putting forth an understanding that they, too, are affected by forces beyond their control. Movement, too, places our protagonists into unexpected and unwanted situations beyond their comfort zones. They’re required to admit that their worldviews are not the only ones that exist in the world and that ignorance flowers and flourishes beyond the bubble that they have carefully cultivated. In this case, liberation also means confronting what the group of friends has sought to block out, such as interactions with well-meaning but highly conservative (and, as it goes here, emotionally harmful) individuals. This includes through a visit to Kel’s parents, who carelessly misgender her while viewing this as an act of love toward their child.
Dreams in Nightmares exists in a floaty state of mind, where independent encounters in each city are tied together by the connective tissue of its characters, one suggestion leading to another interaction spontaneously. The filmmaker continues the impulse that the road trip is a liberatory experience, either with a set conceptual end goal in mind or a way to escape extant conditions while not necessarily requiring a physical destination. Admittedly, the film does not fully return to this idea from the start, but the impulse is admirable. We might also look to Amel Guellaty‘s Where the Wind Comes From (2025), where the road trip itself also represents the dissolution of normality and a deliberate quest for something more—for socioeconomic freedom beyond societal walls, in this case. Even a roadtrip like in Thelma and Louise famously denotes a political act: two women travelling together is a radical choice, an active feminist critique with its infamous ending.
