What Is Strangest Is Inseparable

The River City may have lost former Austin Film Society film programmer Salvatore Botti to the Big Apple last year, but that doesn't mean we won't be hearing from him again, and soon. Dreams of Her, Botti's dreamy feature meditation on memory, love, and loss, is a hypnotic ode not only to boy-meets-girl fantasias but also, in a roundabout way, to Austin itself. With sparkling black-and-white, 16mm cinematography from Moonlight by the Sea's Justin Hennard and a slow, spare vibe that, intentionally or not, echoes the Austin filmmaking class of '91 (and in particular the thoughtful, rambling meditations of Richard Linklater's Slacker), Dreams of Her is as Austin as they come.

"Interestingly enough, I started the film almost exactly two years ago this weekend," says Botti by phone from New York. "The project came about through a compilation of writings that I had put together over the course of many years. At the time, I had saved up some money to begin the film, and, obviously, there's nowhere but Austin I could have done this, simply because of the many resources and people who were so willing to help out.

"The script was only about 40 pages or so – a skeleton – and it worked in such a way that when we shot one thing, other things tended to come about and arise out of that. Conceptually and thematically, the film stems from the two main characters and their realization of their inability to see beyond themselves and the feeling that they may be trapped within themselves."

Dreams of Her unfolds with the languid pace of a summer daydream, and while Botti's love of foreign cinema – Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, in particular – is in evidence throughout, the film (shot entirely in Austin), despite Botti's claim that he wanted to make it "as banal as possible," is still wholly an Austin creation, an ode to late night, Merlot-fueled conversations, and the impact of amour fou on artists, writers, and their memories thereof.

"The way I describe it," adds Botti, "is through the notion of memory and flashbacks, and the retracing or re-rendering of two people's lives and their memories of each other. I don't really see it as a plot-oriented, conventionally narrated film. If you're about to embark on some sort of whirlwind, emotional experience, the little projector in your mind begins to play and you have – or at least I do – a flood of imagery. And that's what I was trying to capture, the private psychologies of these two people."

Dreams of Her screens as part of the Lone Star States program at the Dobie, 3/15, 7pm (the world premiere), as well as at the Alamo on 3/17, 11:30am, and 3/20, 5:30pm.