Dreaming in Red
2011 · 4m · Belgium
Directed by Marc Neys
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A triptych-in-one videopoem for three Howie Good poems, made to benefit a Birmingham crisis center, cut against archival rabies-lab footage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pairing Howie Good's fractured language against rabies-lab footage should be unbearable, but Neys somehow makes the collision feel inevitable rather than forced—it's the kind of perverse formal logic that actually *works*, which is rarer than it sounds.
A precise act of curation: three poems, three registers of archival material, four minutes that understand exactly how videopoem traditions sit between lyric essay and found-footage cinema—Neys commits fully to the triptych form without wasting a gesture.
The decision to use rabies-lab footage as visual counterpoint rather than illustration transforms what could've been a straightforward poetry film into something genuinely unsettling; that single formal choice—the refusal to *explain* the pairing—is what makes it stick.