"Sweet Dreams" is the second film by Ena Sendijarević, a Dutch filmmaker of Bosnian-Herzegovinian descent. The film is set in the early 20th century on the territory of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies. After the death of a wealthy Dutch landowner, his family is faced with a will that bequeaths the entire inheritance – sugar cane plantations, sugar mills, and a luxurious house – to his illegitimate son born to a native servant.

Right from the opening scenes of tiger hunting in the tropical jungle, high aesthetic expectations are set – stylization will be the dominant expressive field of this film. The walls of the family house come to life, blood-red or in shades of green tropical foliage, as if representing the desperate attempts of the wealthy to merge with flora and fauna that do not belong to them. As the film is carefully woven into a synesthetic experience, we can hear everything – from stirring numerous teaspoons of sugar in tea to the buzzing of mosquitoes that regularly interrupts the silence. The music serves nature – programmatic, hypnotic, and atmospheric. It seems to suggest that nature, mystical and powerful, remains elusive to the European colonizer.

However, "Sweet Dreams" is not just a feast for the senses. Sendijarević creates an authorial microcosm that operates coherently according to its own rules. The characters are peculiar and artificial – dramatic like Josephine (Lisa Zweerman), the wife of the "real" heir Cornelius (Florian Myjer), gracefully expressionless like the servant Siti (Hayati Azis), or entirely cynical like the mother Agatha (Renée Soutendijk). While waiting for Cornelius to return from Holland to take over his father's business, Agatha temporarily buries her husband in the jungle, after an unpleasant smell had already started to spread through the house. Later, they fail to find the body, so they lower an empty coffin into the ground. When Agatha mentions the stench in her home, she simply says one gets used to it. The way the author handles delicate themes, such as death or sexuality, makes it clear that there is no identification with the characters here - the film does not rely on narrative empathy but creates a Brechtian distance from the audience and invites us to interpretation and reassessment.

The world of these characters is fragmented and alienated. A conversation between Dutch rich men and a factory worker reveals that each side chooses to understand only what suits them – the owners do not register the word "strike", and the worker hears about "selling" for the first time. Often avoiding showing conversationalists in the same frame, the author further emphasizes the gap between characters who seem to deliver accidentally matched monologues. Each of them is presented as a moving daguerreotype that can only be seen from a specific angle; mostly low angles or profiles. The fragmentation is further emphasized in the division of the film into six stories, a scattered arrangement of their titles, and a broken font.

As one would expect from a film set in the context of colonial history, the power relationship is an important motif. It is even explicit: "Dominance is banal. One group of people oppresses another. Based on what?" Cornelius asks, trying to motivate unpaid workers. Contrary to the comical and grotesque rich, the servants and workers often have witty replies, and the servant Siti subversively uses her dance to end up in bed, or at least in the favor of her masters. Cornelius

unsuccessfully tried to eliminate the new heir, and later in the film, the same boy also poorly aims at him, after which they both burst into laughter.

All of this tells us that Sendijarević did not make a colonial film – the complex power relations are presented as a game, omnipresent and inevitable. Woven into every form of human community, often so fragile that they depend on a few words on paper, a bell that might save a life, or a candle approaching the curtain of a house. Demonstrating the omnipotence of film, "Sweet Dreams" celebrates art and humanity in its own irrationality, while at the same time masterfully drawing attention to essential questions about human nature, social hierarchy, and alienation. Can we sweetly dream in a world without empathy?