Rainy Dreams

On the northern coast of France, in Calais, hundreds of displaced children live in limbo between the violence they fled and the uncertain promise of a life across the sea. Rain seems constant here. Over several months, a filmmaker—himself in exile—volunteers with the children and proposes a simple workshop about dreams, asking not where they came from, but what they see at night. To invite them in, he shares his own dream first: he appears as an animated dog on a live-action ferry, invisible to everyone. The children laugh and tell him to make it more exciting. Only then do they begin to reveal their own dreams, drawing him into a journey through their inner worlds.

This project explores dreams as an involuntary archive of displacement—what a child’s inner life becomes when “home” is no longer a place but a missing object. Set in Calais, a border landscape defined by waiting, rain, and repeated attempts to cross, the film follows five unaccompanied displaced children who share what they see at night. Instead of asking them to explain their past in the language of trauma or paperwork, the project shifts the question toward the present: when safety is uncertain and identity is constantly negotiated, how does the mind protect itself in sleep?

Rainy Dreams explores exile through intimacy: a territory where fears, desires, and memories are transformed and reveal what childhood goes through when borders never sleep.