Ena Sendijarević, a Dutch-Bosnian director, continues to deal with the aporias of personal geography in her new production Sweet dreams. Through a phantasmagorical lens, feeling the pulse of a failed empire ̶ the Dutch Indies at the beginning of the 20th century ̶ the author points to the dismay not only of the ruling class of that time, greatly exhausted by decay due to epochal movements, but also of the native, racially mixed population under the onslaught of internal contradictions. The creative strengths of the film are visible almost entirely on the formal level. High stylization, layered framing (dynamic and static), counterpoint effect of often muffled music suggest a surreal atmosphere that blurs the line between reality and the dreamy and dreamy.

The color design of the sounding, blooming jungle in Indonesia, with its waters, wildlife and starry sky, contrasts with the porous mise-en-scène of the colonialists, powerless to resist the harsh beauty of the tropics, their exhausting heat and blood-sucking mosquitoes. The satin sheen of the red and green walls, among which the bourgeois residents in monochrome uniforms are lounging about, only emphasizes the waning of that world whose time has passed and the crumbling walls like the sugar masonry of an abandoned factory. The pulse of the landowner Jan hardly stopped, and his wife Agata, determined to maintain the failing capital, and the newly arrived son Kornelis and daughter-in-law Jozefina, interested in the fastest possible sale of all immovable property and easy profit, learn of the testamentary will of their patriarch, which transfers the property to his illegitimate son Karel. And since Karel is a minor, this means "lovers" out of necessity: the native Sita, the housemaid.

There was no interest in the dramatic tension that this setting of the plot was motivated to express, along with the physical presence of Reza, a stout servant and the voice of the striker. Was the unfolding of a realistic, historically inspired conceptual basis the preoccupation of the author at all? The characters, flat and one-sided, fail to meet in some emotional focus. This is where the caricature stylization of the acting and room for the grotesque comes from. Heralded by a wide-angle lens that exaggerates the depth and distorts the frame, the young married couple is shown in all its alienation from the wilderness to which they came. The collision of worlds was absent.

Siti, marked as a heroine from the beginning by being separated into separate frames, does not have the strength to become the owner of her own life. She thinks about gathering these forces in order to find the right path for herself and her son in the new social circumstances. And there you can feel the weight of the position of the exploited natives, the impossibility of making the right decision: spaces of freedom await them, only no one knows what sequence will lead to them. That is why Siti is suspiciously focused exclusively on her own interests. When he talks to Reza about going together into an uncertain tomorrow, she gives signs of acceptance. The love act that follows in the forest offers her at least a temporary release from the growing restlessness: nature is a refuge from historical currents too challenging for any individual effort to overcome. The moon rises over their bodies with special effects in the frame and looks like a woman in the eye of the crown. But the day brings her back to the grind of that history. When Jozefina, whose materially generous but morally questionable offer she obeyed, invites her to dance on the farewell night, the

viewer does not feel that dance as hers, but the dance of a marionette of fate, mute, scattered, staring at a split reflection in a cracked mirror.

In their own way, both civilizations were temporarily overcome. And both will make mythically inspired sacrifices. In an almost ritualistic manner of suicide, Agate lets the last lump of sugar in the factory put her to sleep. Siti, staring at the circle made by the hand of Reza's huge body, magnified to occupy the entire frame, in extremely deep focus, somnambulistically enters his palm as free as the jaws of a killed tiger. The border of reality is completely unrecognizable.

Memories of the great historical, in contemporary cinematography again and again actual breakthrough of freedom from the colonizers ̶ which this film had to evoke ̶ have nothing permanent in the form of refinement of the actors, which can keep them alive. This is the tribute that was paid by forcing a form in which a lot was lost. The heroes have no one's hand to prevent them from squirming in the trough, until some element pours them out of it into a sugar mound. The fates and victims of both civilizations, both Western and indigenous, fade after the end of the film, together with the aesthetic order in which the author has placed them.