“A Dance Lessons for Sleepwalkers” is a multi-layered work without its usual deference, about the ties of love, hope, and the power of reconciliation with life’s unpredictability.
Famous neurosurgeon Thomas Ipen has a habit of talking with dead relatives while sitting on the porch—so his wife Kamala, prone to exaggeration, insists. She tells their daughter Amina about this.
Amina isn’t eager to return to her family home, but she does return. It turns out that her mother gave her a “lighter” version of what happens there. Everything is much more complicated and tangled. The events reach back to a journey to India taken by the members of the family twenty years ago. Attempts to get explanations from her father yield nothing. Thomas refuses to talk to his daughter. And then Amina finds mysterious objects buried in her mother’s garden. Soon she understands: the only way to help her father is to make peace with the painful past of her family. But first she must build relationships with the ghosts tormenting every member of the Ipen family…