“I had to say something about what it feels like to be a Black queer person in America”: Shatara Michelle Ford on Dreams in Nightmares

In the follow-up to their 2019 relationship drama Test Pattern, director Shatara Michelle Ford continues their streak of humanist, political filmmaking. Where Test Pattern saw an interracial couple contend with sexual assault and the near impossibility of obtaining a rape kit in Texas, Dreams in Nightmares centres on a friendship group of Black queer femmes embarking on a trip across the states to reconnect with a friend who has fallen off the grid. Ford, an honorary Londoner and self-proclaimed travel nerd, spoke with me about the legacy of the American road movie and the importance of an artist’s chosen family.

“I used to live in south London. I lived in Walworth,” Ford tells me when I let them know where I’m calling from. “I used to work for Transport for London, I’m a transport nerd. I left properly in 2013, but I understood what was happening and how transport was changing. Obviously, development is going to happen, and I was like, what’s going to happen to Black people? The first time I came back I was like, Oh Elephant and Castle is a whole other thing. I don’t even recognise southeast at all”.

In Dreams in Nightmares, Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère), two Black professionals who have been laid off from their stable corporate jobs join their friend Lauren (Dezi Bing), a precariously employed poet, for a wild night out to drown their sorrows. The three of them come up with a plan to find their missing friend Kel (Mars Storm Rucker) and so they spend the next two weeks travelling across the American Midwest.

Is Ford’s penchant for geography the reason they decided to redefine the American road movie?

“That was never the goal to be honest with you,” Ford says. As they are now married to a Brit, the scale of our two countries becomes a point of comparison for them: “This tiny little island had so much specificity based off of the tiniest square footage of a region […] In America, because it’s just so big, things don’t change as quickly, but they do change.” 

Ford’s family moved six hours or 400 miles north of their place of origin, across the Mason-Dixon line to St Louis, Missouri. “I see myself as a Black person differently than my parents do because they had a very different context and relationship. I was code-switching a lot, even between dialects of my family of origin and the dialect spoken in my own house.” 

Ford continues: “I think that there’s this antiquated understanding of Black Americans as being the lost ones that don’t know where they’re from. That’s not true. My ethnicity and my culture was created with a whole hodgepodge of other things, but disconnected from and turned into a new thing.

“I wasn’t intentionally making a road trip movie. The container just became that because I had to say something about what it feels like to be a Black queer person in America, which can mean so many different things depending on where you are. You change as you show up in one state versus another, the way you’re received. What is happening in the world isn’t new. It’s a remix. It’s an evolution and it especially isn’t new for my people. We’ve always managed to create and navigate life and joy.”

A core tenet of queer cinema is the concept of a chosen family. “I was thinking about that in the context of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas [1984] … there seems to be this kind of magical spell that’s put on all people when they watch this movie. It is very gorgeous, and there are all these underlying questions of what does family mean? Who do we belong to? What do we owe each other when we associate in those ways? I’ve always wanted to do some Black gay version of that.” 

The idea of a chosen family extended beyond the film’s inspirations and plot, reaching into the filmmaking itself. “Because I have very little money, I had to rely on shooting locations where I had friends. I also wanted to create scope in my film, because [lack of scope can be] one of the downsides to micro-budget cinema, especially in this moment where everything is very expensive. How do I still create scope when I really don’t have the budget to do that in the official ways? I got some friends in Iowa City, I got some friends in New York, I got some friends in LA. I’m going to string something together based on the kind of resources and the chosen family and community that I already have.” 

“For me as an artist, I wanted to shift from a place of expressing outrage and frustration and disappointment with what is happening currently in the world and move into a space of, well, how do we find something better? How do we create something better?”

Dreams in Nightmares screens as the Special Presentation at this year’s BFI Flare.