You could trace Catherine Corman’s new film Lonely City back to Haussmann’s boulevards, Baudelaire, the flâneur, Simmel’s blasé attitude, modernity’s boredom, and even the surreal FOMO entwined with banality, joy, and horror that saturates the collective social imagination. True, but that’s a facile read.

What really draws me is Catherine’s nonlinear, networked way of navigating texts, images, ideas, and the world. Her references aren’t citations; they’re frequencies you tune into, sparks you follow. It mirrors how I see the world and how I like to work: through webs, not ladders.

Beyond that, I’m drawn to something quieter, more personal, something actually felt, something you want to protect, even as you stay open to others and whatever might emerge.

Over the past few years, I’ve built a small network of arts people who tap into what Saul Alinsky called one core of grassroots organizing: self-interest. Not selfishness, but the clarity that mutual desires and motivations matter and can move things for social good. It’s uncanny how that connects back to the Surrealists, Breton and crew, with their alchemy and dream-obsession, desire as method, almost like a social re-engineering tool.

That’s exactly why I brought Janina Picard in. Her dreamwork practice moves through dreams not just as private night-movies, but as a shared language: floating images that appear in sleep and waking life alike. Janina holds that material (desire, memory, image) in a way that feels communal, like stepping into a space everyone already knows but rarely talks about. It’s the right compass for thinking about Lonely City and Catherine’s approach to the film.

And all of this is part of the behind-the-scenes reveal we’re sharing first through Nato Thompson’s Dreaming in Public and Rusha & Co. gallery before it moves into more formal publishing on Curator. The launch features Janina writing about Catherine, dreamwork, and Lonely City, along with a film teaser and more stills. –Saul Appelbaum