A powerful sense of precarity hangs over Beirut. Following the catastrophic port explosion on August 4, 2020, filmmaker Irene Bartolomé chose not to immediately capture the physical debris. Instead, having made the city her home for six years, she took the necessary time to explore a deeper, more intimate question: how do we heal alongside the broken spaces we inhabit?Dream of Another Summer is a brilliant, experimental documentary-fiction hybrid that uncovers the hidden layers of a battered landscape. At the core of this sensorial journey is Alicia, a woman who collapses among the ruins, sparking a profound investigation into urban survival. Yet, Alicia remains completely invisible and silent throughout the film. In a masterful directorial choice, the audience becomes her eyes and ears, navigating the streets of Beirut through her growing obsession with the city’s vulnerable, damaged grain silos.Bartolomé rejects the easy path of victimhood or passive nostalgia. Instead, she treats the city’s architecture as a living creature possessed of memory and scars. Through a beautifully motionless camera, the film mirrors the psychological weight of isolation while challenging how a modern city reconstructs itself without completely erasing its past.For programmers and audiences alike, this great debut feature stands out as an essential work of cinematographic archaeology. It successfully captures the distinct “scent” of a place and its people who understand that nothing is permanent. This is a hauntingly original, vital cinematic essay on how both cities and human beings transform, adapt, and rebuild themselves from the ashes.Raman Chawla