Dream Factory (2024)

'Dream Factory' is a personal essay on the power of storytelling and the magic and contradictions that is the Indian film industry. The hybrid documentary follows the precarious lives of the "below-the-line" crew of a big-budget Bollywood film, from the perspective of an Indian woman's ambivalent relationship with her culture's myth-making machinery. It is a reverie on the intensely physical, yet invisible, labor behind India's most popular art form. Borrowing Bollywood's grammar to tell the stories of its most marginalized workers, the film raises questions about the price that must be paid to manufacture dreams for a billion people – and who pays.