«The City Was Sleeping and Dreaming of Us» by Natalia Ashurovskaya

Among abandoned stairwells and crumbling palaces in Saint Petersburg, four drifting souls — a vagabond, a romantic, a drunken poet, and a man preparing to transform into a pigeon — move through the golden final days of summer like faded notes from a forgotten melody.

The City Was Sleeping and Dreaming of Us is a cinematic elegy that gently blends fiction and documentary to capture a world on the verge of disappearance. Shot with non-professional actors and shaped through improvisation, the film draws strength from lived experience. Its images feel sedimented with a luminous collective past, giving the film a dreamlike atmosphere. The fragmented form becomes the only language capable of expressing real people, real places, a real moment in time.

With her camera, Natalia Ashurovskaya documents not only spaces under threat of destruction, but also a way of life — fragile, free, poetic — that is slowly and irreversibly vanishing. A striking contrast emerges between the city’s fading beauty and the bitterness of seeing it transform under political pressures; between the destinies of individuals and the blind force of history that crushes them.

There is deep sadness here, but tenderness too. Within this drifting collective of outsiders, we glimpse a generation suspended between memory and exile, clinging to imagination in the face of a return to an ever more unforgiving reality.

Ashurovskaya’s film offers no closure. Instead, it drifts like a dream through the twilight of a city that once belonged to its dreamers — and perhaps, for one fleeting moment, still does.