At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there were few stories quite as strange as co-directing/writing duo Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Strawberry Mansion. The movie is about a world in which people’s dreams are taxed by the government, which often populates them with ads meant to fill their subconsciousnesses with the desire to buy consumer goods.
Strawberry Mansion introduces you to James Preble (Kentucker Audley), a dream auditor who’s tasked with travelling around his region sifting through the taped records of people’s dreams to pinpoint moments in their sleep cycles where they interact with things that can somehow be taxed. When Prebble’s sent out to audit Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), a woman who’s been purposefully trying to conceal her dreams from the taxation department, she reveals a number of secrets to him that begin to make him question the nature of his admittedly dull reality.
The more time Preble and Bella spend together, the more they both begin to feel like the twisted world of her mind might be a place where the two of them could find true happiness and peace with one another. But in a world where people have to pay up simply for thinking about certain things, finding peace in a dreamland proves to be more daunting than either of them expected.
Strawberry Mansion also stars Linas Phillips as Buddy, Reed Birney as Peter Bloom, Grace Glowicki as Young Bella, and Constance Shulman as Martha. While the film has just been picked up for distribution by Alief, there’s currently no hard date on when and on which platforms the movie might be released, but we’ll keep you updated as more news is announced.