Festival audiences know veteran Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic for his powerful, disturbingly magical dramas like Tango Argentino (SFIFF 1993) and The Powder Keg (SFIFF 1999). In Midwinter Night's Dream he takes a gentler look at the internal landscape of his troubled country through the story of a paroled convict and the family he adopts. Lazar (Lazar Ristovski) returns from a ten-year prison stint for a senseless crime of violence to find a woman and her autistic adolescent daughter squatting in his small house. He allows them to stay, and they take him in. Autism is both the moving emotional core and the central metaphor of the film: individuals and whole societies can, as one character puts it, experience a “loss of coherency from inner disorder.” More subtle, both as character and as metaphor, is Lazar himself, shattered veteran of wartime barbarism and the deep sleep of prison. Here is a man in whom terror has lodged itself like shrapnel, yet who emerges with an almost fatalistic optimism that expresses itself in tenderness toward the child, Jovana (beautifully played by Jovana Mitic, who is autistic). He simply can't understand how any problem can be unapproachable. And so he approaches, tries to wake Jovana from her “deep sleep,” to his peril.