Don't Go Back to Sleep

Directed by Stanya Kahn

Don’t Go Back to Sleep is a an experimental narrative film, a haunted tragi-comedy that functions as much as a symbolic meditation on citizen resilience as a metaphor for the violence of the state and the First World’s rapacious impact on the earth, driving the planet itself towards impending death. Shot in Kansas City, Missouri, in newly built homes left uninhabited and unfinished in the economic crash, Don’t Go Back to Sleep follows roving groups of frontline emergency workers adrift in nearly empty, end-times urban and suburban landscapes. Squatting empty suburban developments and luxury high-rises, depressed with the aura of so many displaced by the U.S. housing market catastrophe, nurses and doctors establish make-shift treatment centers within the architectural mundane: fixtures and countertops, carpet pads and exposed wiring, fireplaces and crown molding. As they perform haphazard triage, mostly on each other, we realize they may be the only survivors against a dangerous State.