Final Rating: 3/5
I Dreamed His Name, the debut feature of documentarian Ángela Carabalí, is a gorgeous and deeply personal exploration of rural life in Colombia.
Angela begins the film by discussing the forced disappearance of her father, Esau Carabalí, thirty years prior. Esau was an Afro-Colombian rice farmer with an entrepreneurial spirit who dreamed of having his own mill. He’d made something of a name for himself among local farmers, but after leaving for work one day, he simply never returned.
Angela enlists her sister Juliana and sets out to learn more about her father and his world. Initially, the film implies a small amount of hope that Esau could even still be alive. Failing that, perhaps there are answers to the question of why he was disappeared in the first place.
But Angela and Juliana are less interested in their father’s current whereabouts and more interested in the effect he had on those around him. The sisters use I Dreamed His Name as a way to “find [Esau] in the stories” of people close to him. Who was their father, the rice farmer?
In searching for their father, the sisters become close with the African and Indigenous communities in their part of Colombia, as well as the larger community of families of disappeared people. Having lived several years abroad, they are initially outsiders to these communities but quickly discover the impact their father had was more wide-reaching than they could have imagined. The local indigenous population holds Esau in high regard as one of the first people to encourage them to independently farm the fields they live on.
One of the indigenous farmers states “he lives on in the stories.” As a profile of their father, I Dreamed His Name is a deeply personal film for the Carabalí sisters, and it excels when it leans into that.
A significant portion of the film is taken up by the sisters interviewing their grandmother about what Esau was like as a young man.
One segment discusses Esau’s marriage to the sisters’ mother, and the couple’s political activism. At several points, Angela specifically dissects the way her grief about a disappeared parent affected her mannerisms. Listening to an old recording of her and her sister when they were kids, Angela points out “at this point, he had been gone for three years, but I’m still talking about him in the present tense.”
The subject matter of the film is difficult and dangerous to cover. The filmmakers point out that Colombia is the South American country with the highest number of forced disappearances, and that these disappearances still occur today. Given the circumstances, it may not be possible to answer why Esau was taken. But I Dreamed His Name does an admirable job of answering “what did Esau leave behind.”
I Dreamed His Name was seen during the 2025 Hot Docs film festival.
