Dorothy Carrington was the Heineman prizewinning author of the definitive book on Corsica ‘Granite Island’ and has inspired travellers and journalists alike. ‘The Dream Hunters’, her book on the Mazzeri, the pre-modernity death-prophesiers of Corsica, reawoke a historical, yet contemporary, facet of the living mythologies of the historically insular culture. The film suggests that the Mazzeri may be alive and well and still practising their cultural heritage.

This experimental and creative film explores the definition of reality evident in Corsican belief systems commanded through the world of the Mazzeri, who hunt in their sleep and kill an animal in whose face they recognise a member of their community who will fall ill and die within a year. Notions of certainty or uncertainty, reality or fiction, ‘real’ or the ‘unreal’ existed simultaneously in Corsican consciousness. There is no definitive division between dream and reality. Corsican bilocation raises ideas of duality, of the doubling of the persona. Relatives will testify that the Mazzere, usually an ordinary resident of the village, was to be seen in bed at the same time as they claimed to be hunting in the woods. In the film the duality of the subject is tri-fold: Dorothy Carrington the writer with two backgrounds; the Mazzeri the harbingers of death who live in two worlds; the viewers (including the filmmaker) who live in the double world of representation and social interaction.