FULL HD VIDEO, SHORT FILM
DURATION: 13’39’’
DIRECTOR: AURORA CARUSO
NARRATION: RICCARDO EGGSHELL
YEAR: 2025
New York Is a Dream Machine is a short film constructed from the metaphors evoked by the city’s urban spaces and the shifting threshold between night and day. Light drives the narrative: the protagonist, a wandering soul moving through sleepless nights, encounters nocturnal spirits and symbolic figures, while the story unfolds through free, associative connections between images, concepts, and historical references.
The film is rooted in the concept of psychogeography, understood as the capacity of environments to alter and expand psychic possibilities. Metaphorically, the protagonist is located on the island of Manhattan, while the figure embodying desire and torment inhabits the Renwick Ruins on Roosevelt Island. Separated by the Hudson River, they face one another across a space of distance and ambiguity, suspended between night and day, consciousness and the unconscious.
The Renwick Ruins, the remains of the former Smallpox Hospital, form the film’s symbolic core: Gothic ruins saturated with memory, isolated within the urban landscape, and serving as the point of origin for the narrative associations. The figures inhabiting this space—Beatrice from The Divine Comedy, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and a reference to quantum physics—are not direct citations but symbolic presences emerging from an inner process.
Through Gothic architecture, stained glass, and the exclusive use of dawn and dusk light, the film explores the coexistence of light and darkness, life and dreams. New York Is a Dream Machine is an introspective inquiry born from experiences of insomnia, a sense of separation from the surrounding world, and an attempt to traverse a liminal space in which the city, like a dream, becomes both revelation and loss.
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