Dreamers Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s detention centre drama Dreamers is a solid debut

Isio (Ronkę Adékoluęjo) is sent to an immigration detention centre after living and working in the country illegally for two years. Having fled her native Nigeria due to persecution and violence, she is certain she will be granted leave to stay if she just plays by the rules and makes her case clearly. Her cynical roommate, Farah (Ann Akinjirin) is not so sure, pointing out that the system is purposefully stacked against them. As months stretch out and Isio’s faith in the process starts to wane, her relationship with Farah grows, and the two women find love in the most unwelcoming of places.

Dreamers is the feature film debut from writer/director Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, who loosely based the story on her own experience of claiming asylum in the UK. While Gharoro-Akpojotor actively sought to highlight the absurdity, cruelty, and failing bureaucracy of the UK asylum system, she couldn’t have imagined the climate her film would debut in, when immigration is probably the most divisive issue plaguing politics and public opinion today. It is a vital, timely piece of storytelling.

Hatchworth Removal Centre seems at pains to suggest it is not a prison – look, there are books, and art supplies, and the walls are painted pastel colours! You can have a real bed and help in the kitchen! Yet Dreamers’ setting is an undeniably cold and bleak place, filled with desperate women who Gharoro-Akpojotor highlights, are just like you and me. They’re educated, they have jobs and lives and children, and they all have very real reasons not to be able to go back to their home countries. There are heartbreaking tales of terrorism, sexual violence and physical brutality.

The sources of light and warmth – and I mean this in a literal sense as Gharoro-Akpojotor changes up her design and lighting to bring figurative emotion to physical life – are in the relationships the women build with each other. First between Isio and Farah, and then with a wider group of friends within the centre. Dreamers shows us that even in the darkest of places, there can be joy, laughter and dancing – it’s in our nature for humans to create light in the darkness.

Adékoluęjo shines as Isio, the open-hearted, emotional young woman slowly being beaten down by the world around her. She gives a crushingly vulnerable performance in a scene in which an immigration officer tells her that she must somehow prove her claim that she is a lesbian if she wants leave to remain – the absurdity of that request is abundantly clear. Akinjirin possibly has the harder role as the tough-shelled Farah, with her journey to vulnerability feeling authentic and earned.

At just under 80 minutes long, Dreamers does only sketch some of its characters and ideas in the simplest of terms, and perhaps could have afforded to push its narrative into darker and riskier territory – there’s a wealth of stories within this centre and even just within these two women, but it feels like we only just scratch the surface of them. There are no great surprises in where the story takes us, but what we do get is very effective.

A compassionate debut from Gharoro-Akpojotor, Dreamers uses a sweet and hopeful love story to ground its wider message about the bleakness of the UK asylum system. Powered by strong performances, it’ll worm its way into your heart before breaking it.

Dreamers is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival; it will be released in UK cinemas on 5th December 2025

Check out more reviews from the 2025 London Film Festival here