The Dreamer

In a liminal city where gaslight and celluloid bleed together, a melancholic projectionist—played by Theodore Lorch—discovers that every reel he threads births a parallel self: a doppelgänger who escapes the booth and prowls through night alleys clutching a copper key. Ethelyn Gibson’s flapper-philosopher, part séance-hostess, part street-corner Cassandra, trails this specter with a hand-crank camera, convinced the key unlocks the mouth of the world itself. Billy West’s bricklayer-poet, equal parts Buster Keaton and Rimbaud, keeps demolishing and rebuilding the same wall, each time embedding a shaving-mirror that reflects not faces but futures. The trio’s orbits intersect inside an abandoned winter-garden where nitrate ghosts perform an endless pantomime; here, Lorch confronts his own aging silhouette, discovers the key fits the sprocket holes of existence, and cranks the cosmos backward until rain falls upward, neon spells unreadable alphabets, and the city folds into a zoetrope strip the width of a sigh. No explanations, no tidy epiphanies—only the flickering certainty that every dreamer is someone else’s brief intertitle.