»A word from you, and I can live.«
– Paul Celan

Almost 25 years of powerful, eloquent correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan lasted until his suicide in 1970. 260 pages long, a direct insight into an intoxicating, complex and painful relationship. The two young actors Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp in The Dreamed Ones read the dialogue between the two great voices of German poetry. Bachmann is 21 years old, Paul Celan 27 when they meet in post-war Vienna, he is a Holocaust survivor, she is the daughter of a Nazi party member. For her, it’s the great love of her life, and yet she never ceases to see the stranger in him, whose experiences she never had herself. The couple reach their limits, and in a moment of doubt, she asks: »Are we just the dreamed ones?«

Between the scenes in the recording studio the camera continues to run, the actors step out of their roles, talk about the letters and other things such as tattoos or music, they have fun, smoke cigarettes, argue.
These breakaway moments see the levels blur; they convey the idea of Beckermann’s cinematic approach, for which she is using actors for the first time: The Dreamed Ones is an experiment to examine, in today’s context, the effect of a lyrically processed love story from the pen of two of the greatest poets in the German language. Beckermann developed the concept with screenwriter Inga Hartwig, and they wrote the book together over the period of one year. The linguistically dense basis of the text and the powerful acting of Laurence Rupp and Anja Plaschg (the latter is also the singer with band Soap&Skin) correspond with the film’s own scaled down cinematic language.