Christine Haroutounian's 'After Dreaming' Reaches New York October 25

Christine Haroutounian's feature-directing debut, After Dreaming, screens in New York for the first time this Sunday, October 25, at Asia Society. The showing arrives nearly seven months after the film found a U.S. home at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies in 2026 — and more than a year and a half after its world premiere at the 2025 Berlinale.

That is a long route for a debut feature. Between Berlin and New York, the film played festivals in Busan and Thessaloniki before the Los Angeles date finally secured it an American platform. New York, until now, had not seen it at all.

The Asia Society slot is not a standalone booking. The film screens as part of the venue's Armenian cinema retrospective, programmed by Sona Karapoghosyan, who described After Dreaming as a "surreal exploration of a patriarchal society inseparable from war."

What is the film actually about?

The official synopsis sets the scene in post-war, pre-peace Armenia:

• A well-driller is mistaken for an enemy and killed in the countryside.
• His family hides his death from their daughter, Claudette.
• A soldier, Atom, is asked to take her away before the funeral.
• Atom tells Claudette her family awaits her at a remote monastery.

The synopsis closes with the film's governing image: "On the road together, faces and places at the brink of disappearing come into existence just as they fall away."

That sentence does most of the critical work here. It signals a film less interested in wartime events than in the unstable texture of memory and loss — things surfacing at the moment of vanishing. Karapoghosyan's word "surreal" and the synopsis's language point the same direction. What the material does not tell us is how the film resolves, or whether the monastery promise holds; the description stops at the threshold of the journey.

A trailer has been released to mark the New York date. It is the first substantial preview available to U.S. audiences ahead of the screening.

What does this change for the film?

A New York premiere inside a curated retrospective gives After Dreaming something a festival slot alone has not: institutional framing. Karapoghosyan has positioned Haroutounian's debut within a national cinema lineage rather than as an isolated title. That placement, not the screening itself, is the news. A single showing is a moment; a retrospective berth is a claim about where a filmmaker belongs.

Whether broader U.S. distribution follows remains unstated in all announcements so far. For now, October 25 at Asia Society is the only confirmed New York date — one screening, one programmer's endorsement, and a debut that took the slow road to get there.