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HARLEY AND THE DREAM FACTORY

HARLEY EN DE DROMENFABRIEK

By Tim OLIEHOEK

PHANTA BASTA! - as PROD

Action/Adventure - Development 2019

Mouthy socially-inept Harley discovers a Dream Factory, where a grumpy Dreamwriter turns out to be responsible for the nightmares of the people of Harley’s hometown. Can Harley inspire the grumpy man to find joy in his work again when she herself is so cripplingly shy that she’s never made a friend?

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Children's
- Countries
- NETHERLANDS, GERMANY
- Languages
- DUTCH
- Budget
- 3 - 5 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Tim OLIEHOEK
- Writer(s)
- Eveline VERWOERD, Karen VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN
- Producer(s)
- Harro VAN STAVERDEN (Phanta Basta!), Michiel BARTELS (Phanta Basta!), Petra GOEDINGS (Phanta Basta!)
- Synopsis
- Harley (11) has a birthday coming up, but she doesn’t want a party and prefers to pretend she doesn’t need any friends either. Nobody knows that she is actually terrified of making contact and has nightmares about her classmates. In those dreams a little boy keeps appearing that helps her get out of scary situations. Who is this boy? Harley starts to investigate and finds out that the people around her all have been having nightmares. When, to her utmost surprise, she spots the boy from her nightmares in the streets, she decides to secretly follow him.
  
  She ends up in a hidden Dream Factory, where Dream Writers work 24/7 on creating real life people’s dreams. They should be able to stop her nightmares here! Harley cunningly manages to infiltrate as the new Dream Writer. With the boy’s help, she works her way through all selection exams and the factory appears to be a really fun world at first. But the surroundings become more threatening when she discovers that the person writing all those nightmares is a grumpy old man who enjoys scaring people. He is impossible to work with. Harley wants to ask the boy for help, but he escaped the factory again, because after years of writing dreams, he wants to have a taste of the real life for himself. Bravely, Harley opposes the old man in a dream writing battle, in which she has to try and give his unpleasant concoctions a light twist. But the old man overrules her time and time again, and he even succeeds in inciting the other Dream Writers to focus on writing nightmares only! Then Harley discovers what is actually going on with him. He’s upset because the people never seem to take the life lessons he infuses the dreams with to heart. That’s the reason for those nightmares… If they don’t want to listen, he’ll make them feel it… Harley becomes angry. So just because he doesn’t feel comfortable, Harley has to deal with these nightmares every night? Let alone all the people around her! With this outburst she inadvertently reveals her identity and the old man tells the supervisors that she’s an intruder. They lock her away in the Dream Archives. And that on her birthday. Here, Harley has to recycle dreams for people who have shut themselves off from life and don’t have any new experiences, meaning they don’t need very exciting dreams. The oppressive room is driving Harley nuts, which leads to a confrontation with the old man, who starts to feel sorry for her in the end. He writes her a dream that clarifies the issue his nightmares couldn’t tell her before: that she acts tough, but what she really wants deep inside is friendship! When Harley realizes that this is true, she begs him to help her escape and promises she’ll find the old man’s only friend - the boy - and that she’ll convince him to come back. Will he stop with these nightmares if she does?