In Calais, displaced children describe their dreams while waiting at the edge of Europe. As their words transform into hand-drawn animation, their stories survive where reality has failed to keep them safe.

In Calais, on the French coast, hundreds of displaced and unaccompanied children wait for a crossing to the UK that may never come. Rainy Dreams is a hybrid animated documentary that approaches their world through the dreams they share at night.

Over the course of a single winter night, five children from South Sudan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Vietnam and Afghanistan recount recurring dreams in which the sea, boats, courts, churches, shoes and fire keep returning in strange combinations. A girl drifts across the Channel in a fragile wooden crate lit by drawings of the home she left behind; a boy is forced to prove his age in a circus-like trial; another wanders through a coastal city where people fold and hand in their own shadows; a girl gives birth to crying military boots; a nine-year-old is sent to school in a flying tank that slowly splits her in two.

Between these dreams, we glimpse the children’s waking world in Calais and on the opposite shore, where familiar streets, rooms and waiting areas quietly tilt into the surreal and echo the logic of their sleep. Moving from night towards morning, Rainy Dreams traces how exile, bureaucracy and violence seep into the imagination and begin to reshape what “home”, “safety” and “future” can mean for a child.