“I had no idea how quickly the conditions being documented would shift,” says Jason Lester, a filmmaker who set out to capture the empty streets of Los Angeles during the coronavirus lockdown. “Just a few months later the streets are full again, but the masks are worn by protesters being tear gassed and fired upon by US police and military forces; and the face shields denied medical staff in the moment of greatest need are seen ubiquitously on the faces of jackbooted officers.”

Under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, the last few weeks have seen the biggest civil rights marches in history. All fifty US states and multiple countries around the world have come together for protests demanding racial equality and police reform after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis. “This film marks a moment in time, a brief pause in day-to-day life that reveals gaping fissures in the fabric of our society,” says the director. 

To highlight the disconnect between the fantasy of Los Angeles and the lived reality for many of its citizens, a computerised voice gives a unimpassioned monologue over imagery that explores the truth of a city after the tourists, luxury stores and entertainment are removed from the streets. Through silent vignettes, It Was Like A Dream… leaves us with images of homelessness, comments on the shallowness of capitalism and the hypocrisy of multiculturalism.

“The ubiquitous images of store closures, curfews, and masks did not leave us, but turned out to be malleable images and symbols applicable to another virus—American racism and white supremacy, which have been with us since the country’s inception,” says Lester. “History moves quickly these days. My memories of the shutdown are already hazy and indistinct. The quiet of the initial COVID-19 shutdown was just a prelude to an eruption of necessary protest. It looks like it’ll be a summer in the streets after all.”