Before I Wake is a film that explores the queer experience through the eyes of a younger sister struggling to connect with her older sister’s transformed state into adulthood and motherhood. As queer filmmakers, we are drawn to experiences and vulnerabilities that deviate from or conflict with gender norms, and to the psychological violence that arises from tensions like those: the alienation and confusion that emerge when traditional modes of womanhood embodied by family, friends, loved ones, or even strangers, no longer reflect our identity. It is being faced with the realization of being the “other.”

The film is also a commentary on how spaces constantly transform as urban development and gentrification invade city’s outskirts, and the lack of third spaces for adolescents. Before I Wake takes place in a dream, a nostalgic refuge preserving the protagonist’s memories, where the sisters ride their motorbike through familiar neighborhoods, revisiting childhood haunts and escaping their troubled home. The dreamscape contrasts with the narration that describes the real world, where those once-familiar places have been replaced by new structures. This transformation parallels the sister’s relationship, which in reality has grown distant and irreconcilable.

Queer loneliness become internal landscapes shaped by memory and absence. We cultivate this sense of longing and surrealism through subtle world-building: shots of a fallen tree, a silent playground, spiderwebs, and scattered, broken remnants of the past within an abandoned building. Memories construct a liminal world, neither fully alive nor entirely gone. It is the violence of being trapped between the past and estrangement. At the same time, memories also become fantasies: they are fragile means of survival through which we navigate grief and nostalgia. In dreams, we remember and feel, and then we wake up.​