I first saw Strawberry Mansion during the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. While viewing the very independent, very homegrown feature from co-writers and co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, I longed for a serenely cool theater filled with other (probably very stoned) moviegoers. The film is gentle and kooky, set in a dystopic future that aesthetically borrows from the '80s. Demons, Nick Cave-like creatures, VHS tapes, buckets of fried chicken, and fedora hats populate it. It's.
imagines a world where the time people spend fast asleep isn’t truly their own. Instead, it’s the latest frontier where both businesses and the government see money-making opportunities that people usually only have to deal with in the waking world.
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While there are a fair number of people who are able to recall their dreams in vivid detail, and others who forget their dreams as soon as they wake up, there are startlingly few people capable of telling others about their dreams in a way that effectively conveys both the significance and weird wonder of it all.
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Strawberry Mansion
Starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas Phillips, and Constance Shulman.
SYNOPSIS:
In a future where the government records dreams and taxes them, a dream auditor gets caught up in the dreams of an aging eccentric.
Forward-thinking authors over the decades have theorised that our dreams and memories might one day be commodified, an idea which gets an especially peculiar treatment in Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s (
Sylvio) black comedy adventure
Strawberry Mansion.
In a dystopian future, the government has extended taxation to citizens’ dreams, resulting in “dream auditors” being sent around the U.S. to total up the “expenditure” – that is, seemingly any meaningful content, be it hot air balloons, buffalos, or dandelions – by placing a worth on them and charging accordingly.