Dyke Dreams
Details
Artist: Anette Gellein
Title: Dyke Dreams
Year: 2024
Duration: 7:20 mins
Medium: Triptych (as single channel) with stereo sound, 16mm film transferred to digital
Credit: Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Dyke Dreams (2024)
Anette Gellein
Selected by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway
Dyke Dreams (2024), shot on 16mm analog film, takes the form of an erotic commercial that gradually transforms into a horror movie, where the characters claw their way through each other’s bodies. The work draws inspiration from Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) and can be seen as a tribute to his iconic piece. The film touches on the local oil industry, the Americanization of Norwegian culture, and queer loneliness. It plays with a fictional historical oil past in Stavanger, blurring the lines between reality, dreams, and fiction.
Dyke Dreams is a project developed both in Stavanger and Canada. The text, sound, and editing were developed during an artist residency at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers in Toronto. The film was shot in Stavanger with performers Pia Dahl, Torunn Larsen, Nathalie Wiberg, and Miriam Teshager, with special effects by Michael Wallin.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway, say:
The soft celluloid dreaming of Gellein’s new work is ambivalent and complex. Dyke Dreams presents dreams as a siren’s song, seducing and luring us. Using the visual language of commercial advertising, it explores how dreams as desire are sold back to us, warped, as consumption, as a means to consume us–and the glossy, sexy, oily image that sells it to us. Our collective dreaming can undercut this extractive oppression–the cannibalistic consumption of capitalism: It can rip it apart, reassert itself, its own need, our own needs—the need for a radical alternative queer future. It shows us both the dark underside of dreams and their sexy subversive potential for emancipation.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International, mean to you as an artist?
As an artist based in a smaller city in Norway, where there isn’t a large scene for artist film or experimental film, initiatives like Artists' Film International mean a great deal to me.
It means a lot to me to know that there is a big community working with artist films globally. I think we need to stay together through our common interest in moving images. We need to know we are not alone and build bridges and solidarity with each other, especially to keep on pushing the boundaries of moving images. It is also a political tool that we need to preserve in terms of different ways of using moving images to tell the stories that are important to us and how we (need to) tell them.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I started doing simple DIY films with what digital cameras were available to me when I was around 16–17 years old. It was before I knew so much about film or art. It was a way to question my surroundings and express myself creatively, investigate the political and poetical. I would say that now, but at that moment I had no clue what I was actually doing. I was just trying to figure out my life as a teenager and young adult. Before this I made films with my two older sisters, we would make music, small films and just have fun together. There was no goal for our engagement, it was not a ‘project’. I never thought I would work with film and art growing up. I would also film my friends or conversations, even my best friend the moment she was falling asleep. Adding sounds to them became even another layer to express and experiment. Since then, I went on to study at an art and film school in Lofoten, where I initially claimed to never really wanting to make films since I felt alienated with the focus on film industry and technology rather than expression. Luckily at this school that was no issue, as we could do whatever we wanted. It was an open, free and critical education.
I feel very differently now regarding many of the things I was against before, for example analogue film has now become something so special to me. I think this is also a part of growing as a person, one can remember and evolve. I grew up with digital media, so I think the boundaries that come with analogue film makes me hyper focused, as I try to get as little useless footage as possible.
I am not didactic in any sense, so I see myself also working with digital cameras again in the future. Depending on what the project's thematic and conceptual framework is. Right now, I am working on a trilogy project, all in analogue film. Much because of the references and the feeling I try to evoke with the project, which is a lot of 70s experimental film and building parallel fictive alternative historical pasts. Also where I am at right now in my life it just makes more sense to investigate these subjects more.
Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
I often think of my projects as building fictional parallel realities. Where the mental and real world merge. My works also have an aspect of horror and psychological drama to them. I love how horror and the theatrical can be a way to subvert our heteronormative and bourgeois culture. It goes beyond “acceptable" behaviour, and in that I think there is a potential of cathartic release when making films together with others. Or at least it feels meaningful. We can show the brutality of living and suggest a different world at the same time! I often work with friends and extended family, or just people I meet at the bar and get a sense that we share some common ground, maybe just an openness and curiosity. It is very intuitive and exciting. These connections make it feels like we are doing something special together, we share a dream of a different world. Very immediate and locally in our hometown, but also emotionally and in a wider political sense. Coming together with fellow freaks in my small town means a lot to me! It feels very rewarding and important to be able to work in a setting that is not alienating, but rather spacious and collective.
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
I am now working on a film project titled Stoner Queen of Hearts. This is the third film in what I see as a trilogy, building on the film projects Love and Greed and Pain and Lust (2023) and Dyke Dreams (2024).
Stoner Queen of Hearts is an experimental costume drama that follows a fictional local monarchy in my hometown. I will work with many of the same performers as in my previous projects. It will include drama, love triangles and a revolution. Even a ball scene! One of my inspirations for this project is the book Zapatista Stories For Dreaming An-Other World.
This film project will be shown for the first time at Kunsthall Stavanger in February 2026 for a solo show.
Details
Artist: Anette Gellein
Title: Dyke Dreams
Year: 2024
Duration: 7:20 mins
Medium: Triptych (as single channel) with stereo sound, 16mm film transferred to digital
Credit: Anette Gellein, Dyke Dreams, 2024. Produced through support from the BKH regional award and Liaison of Independent Filmmakers, Toronto. Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI’25 by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway.