Busy night in my brain last night, coming up with dream ideas that I have no way to actually complete... but interesting enough still on waking that I want to make a note of. :)
(behind a cut because, well, other people's dreams...)
So the setting was supposed to be a historical medieval European town, in a Jewish ghetto. There was a young couple in love, engaged to be married, but the young man's work took him outside the ghetto so he could earn enough money to support the two of them, and one night on his way home, a combination of accidental circumstance and boiling-over racism lead to him killed at the beginning of a pogrom that burned most of the Jewish quarter to the ground - very tragic romance sort of thing. In the future, a company with quantum time-travel technology saw this, and decided that it would make a perfect subject for their next big movie Oscar-bait project -- they would send back a bunch of microscopic cameras, plant a few attractive, camera-friendly agents to nudge things to even further cinematic heights, and then when the course of events was the perfect blend of beautiful tragedy, this would snap into being historical reality, they would capture it all on film, and win all sorts of awards, make a lot of money, that sort of thing...
I was (in the dream) going to be the young man's 'best friend,' to make sure he got into the right sort of screen-friendly trouble to garner sympathy from a modern audience - but secretly I was hoping to nudge events so that the couple (who were my friends) could both survive and escape together in the end, and maybe minimize other deaths along the way. There was also a central antagonist provided by the studio, a handsome blond man to provide a sneering menace and focus for the camera - who had signed up for this because he 'secretly' just liked to kill people, beautiful heroine included, and as many others as he could get to along the way. And then there was a secret agent, who turned out to be an older me from another timeline, that wanted to spoil the entire movie plot, prevent the tragedy from happening in the first place, and if I was going to have to kill some racist assholes in the past to do it, it was still better than the hundreds of deaths that were going to accompany any other version.
There was going to be a whole timeline of overlapping, repeating events, as any of us could rewind time if things got too far off the course we wanted, but we didn't have access to the camera footage (for 'naturalistic' purposes) so we'd only know what we actually could find out about, and plots and plans and counter-plans, as we all tried to make our own version and prevent the others from stopping it - but we couldn't be too overt about it, because the people working the cameras would just rewind it if it didn't appear to fit the 'historical plot' - it all had to just come together, and in a way that would make a great story for the audience.
Anyway, fun complicated idea - I have no capacity to actually produce it, so there's probably a good reason the dream didn't go much beyond actually laying out all the premise for me. Setting aside the complexity of the repeating timeline and conveying everyone's plots, I don't know enough actual Jewish history to make up a good fake one, let alone a good fake that could then be presented as another version for a modern media audience... Also there's the thing where the obvious 'good' ending would be for the whole movie to get spoiled, but I don't know what would make it not have the problem of 'but this doesn't address the actual long-standing racial tension;' maybe it's enough to present it as a good thing that time-traveling movie executives can't exploit this specific tragedy, and that the problems of racism and hate don't lend themselves to cinematic solutions -- but also I want my dreams to have a good story! :)
