Dreaming in American is an experimental feature documentary that uses animation to dramatize a new, transitional existence for the people of Travessia, Brazil: an existence characterized by the loss, nostalgia, and imagination that attend the experience of contemporary global migration. The film tells the story of Travessia (“Crossing”), Brazil, a small rural town in the state of Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) displaced by a staggering forty percent through a wave of migration to the United States—mostly to Eastmouth, Massachusetts, a town on Boston’s North Shore. The story is told through the voice of Milla, a young teacher who sets out to understand the enormous changes in her town, life, and culture by making the choice to immigrate herself. The haphazard dismantling and rebuilding of Travessia in the environs of Eastmouth reveals its contours along her journey, in a “city symphony” of encounters with Travessienses living, on both sides of the border, in many different stages and conditions of the immigrant experience. Pursuing her own dreams, Milla ultimately comes of age in a place somewhere between Brazil and the US. And, as her fellow Travessienses chart the uneasy space between new and old ideas of home, family, and intimacy in the digital age, she too gradually uncovers the realities behind the “American Dream” and struggles to maintain connections with her own family, identity, and homeland amidst conflicting yearnings for clarity and personal freedom. Meanwhile, as American ideals of success and happiness permeate deeper into Travessia’s social fabric, unusually strong rains overflow the Rio Doce (“Sweet River”), threatening to flood the town. Milla’s dreams, and those of the fractured Travessia community, balance precariously between aspiration and destruction.

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