Poussière (2020)

As night falls, dreams and nightmares battle for the sleep of a young woman... The two antagonists materialise from the dust under the sleeping woman's bed - or are they rather the two sides of one and the same creature, in which two opposing ‘passions’ fight for supremacy? In any case, the young woman has an exhausting night as she is torn between sweet dreams and frightening delusions. Until, in the end, dream (Rêve) and nightmare (Cauchemar) do the maths: Which of them will have won? ‘Dust’ is a poetic and lovingly crafted fantasy about what all too often robs us of sleep at night. The Italian animation artist Alessia Puli varies her story to the beat of an ever-increasing rhythm: the two temperaments vie creatively for the upper hand in the young woman's sleep, whose mental space is filled with patterns, flowers, mythical creatures and even some terrifying monsters - a crescendo that ends in an explosion of strokes, lines and shapes that borders on the abstract, before the film culminates in a finale that brings a smile to the face. Words are superfluous in this story, which allows for a simple, universal reading. The director plays enchantingly with this simplicity, but also with the aesthetic challenge, overlaying two techniques, two graphic styles and two colour palettes to distinguish dreams from reality. Alessia Puli is a 2D animator, director and illustrator. She deals with themes such as adulthood, self-acceptance, sadness and depression, which she visualises with friendly irony. She prefers to use traditional animation, watercolours and ligne claire.