Trigger Warning: The following TO WATCH addresses suicide

Dreaming is almost impossible when everyday life keeps you awake. The reality you inhabit is too frightening, too unstable to allow real rest. Nights are not places of escape but extensions of tension. Even while sleeping, the body remains on alert. One phone call is enough to eject you from your life and thrust you into a new scenario: your family facing deportation, your mother confessing she has always resented you, or your husband appearing for a split second as if he might throw your baby out of a third-floor window. In moments like these, the future loses its horizon. Hope does not feel like a promise but like a liability. To dream is to expose yourself. To make plans is to assume you will be allowed to stay.

What should we dream of by Milena Aboyan and Constantin Hatz follows three young women in Germany whose lives intersect in subtle, almost invisible ways. Each moves within her own set of constraints, shaped by social, institutional, and intimate pressures, yet none of them is defined by them.

Laura moves through society on temporary release, accepted only on probation. Her freedom can be revoked at any moment; her life unfolds in a constant state between participation and exclusion. Evîn fights on another front, against the cold precision of German bureaucracy, against forms, notices, and deadlines that steadily postpone the possibility of an autonomous life. Her suppressed anger grows from defiance and disappointment at the obstacles repeatedly placed in her way. Julia exists within a subtler yet equally brutal framework of expectation, shaped by assumptions about who she should be beside her husband and by the violence that follows. Adaptation becomes a survival strategy. Resistance becomes an inner necessity.

What should we dream of confronts the burden of being young in a system that promises security while producing insecurity. Yet these women begin to reject invisibility. They refuse to be reduced to victims, silenced, or pushed out of the frame, for themselves, for their families, and for those who will come after them and may be forced to endure similar battles.