Dream World (a 13 mins Psyche Film)
The
filmmakers who transform fantasies into videos with an audience of one
This film
contains adult material.
If you
can imagine it, you can find it on the internet – or so it’s been said. But, in
the rare cases when this adage proves false, the team at Anatomik Media are
here to help. This Los Angeles-based production studio, run by the
husband-and-wife team Dan and Rhiannon Humes, specialises in custom fetish
videos. The couple used to produce more traditional porn films, but found their
calling in bringing people’s fantasies to life. In the short documentary Dream
World, the director Chung Nguyen takes viewers behind the scenes at Anatomik,
probing the often strange and unexpected, yet sometimes quite rich and
emotional work of making dreams a reality.
While the
studio’s initial commissions veered toward the sexual, the business has since
become ‘something else’, as Dan Humes puts it, with the filmmakers now
receiving all manner of requests. Sometimes, they’re asked to recreate a
treasured or troubled childhood memory, giving their client the safety to
revisit something that might have provoked fear, anxiety or excitement at the
time, and to experience it anew. In this way, these custom videos can even be
therapeutic – ‘an anchor’ tethering the viewer to the world.
Although
it is a collaborative process, where clients send in ideas, sometimes even a
script, and the filmmakers and actors work together to bring it to life, the
enjoyment of the video is ultimately very personal, and the team might never
know how it was received. Yet, despite this distance between business and
customer, one actor describes the possibility for an ‘intimate, interpersonal
connection’, because clients have trusted her with their desires and allowed
her to embody them.
There’s a
gentle humour without judgment, great compassion and evident joy in how the
team approach their work, and the empathic way they view their clients’ unique
requests. For the filmmakers and actors, it’s a privilege to be allowed to see
this part of a person that’s usually a secret, and it’s deeply fulfilling to be
able to make a client’s secret dreams come true. What some would treat with
mirth – a foot fetish, say – is instead allowed to be an expression of
something deeply personal, an appreciation for the beauty in what others find
mundane. For the filmmaking team, these intimate details provide a meaningful
glimpse into what makes us each uniquely human.
Written
by Freya Howarth
