The most striking British film debut of 2025 is a queer immigrant love story

‘I have been through the system,’ says filmmaker Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, ‘and my goal here was to tell a story of asylum seeking from the point of view of an asylum seeker’

Dreamers is the most striking British debut of 2025 – a romantic, urgent and desperately sad glimpse into the world of immigration detention centres and the relationships that can flower there. It’s also being released into a moment of heightened hostility towards immigrants to Britain, from all across the political spectrum. But such volatile cultural temperatures aren’t exclusive to 2025, either.

For filmmaker Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor – a first-time feature director with producer credits on UK hits including Blue Story and Boxing Day – negativity surrounding immigrants has dominated headlines during every step of Dreamers’ multi-year development, and it goes back further. “We’re having the exact same conversations about ‘immigrants taking your jobs’ that we were having 20 years ago,” she says. “It hasn’t moved on. I want to challenge people to make different choices and really think for themselves.”

She doesn’t believe people truly understand the immigration process, or how it is exploited by bad-faith actors eager to spread division. “The rise in taxes has nothing to do with immigration. What you can and can’t afford in your day-to-day has nothing to do with immigration. It has to do with whoever is in power, but immigration is such nice, low hanging fruit – the message is ‘all of them are bad’. With this film, I’m hoping to create an individual. Look at what she’s been through. She doesn’t care about your job and what you’re doing – that’s the last thing on her mind. She’s just trying to find her love.”

Dreamers revolves around Isio, played by Ronkę Adékoluęjo, who is being held at a detention centre after arriving in Britain from Nigeria, where she faces persecution for her sexuality. While Isio is forced to repeatedly attempt to prove the dangers of her birth country, she meets and falls in love with one of her fellow detainees, Farah (Ann Akinjirin).

Ronkę Adékoluęjo in Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s ‘Dreamers’ (We Are Parable)

The film was partly inspired by Gharoro-Akpojotor’s own experiences, as she too claimed asylum as a result of her sexuality. “I have been through the system, and my goal here was to tell a story of asylum seeking from the point of view of an asylum seeker. Films don’t always centre the humanity of what they’re going through. And I also wanted to do that through a love story.”

Far more than an immigration film, Dreamers is also a rare example of a queer love story about two Black women, something Gharoro-Akpojotor knows is a very big deal. “I think it’s the second Black lesbian film to be in cinemas in the UK, which is crazy,” she says. For Dreamers, she wanted sumptuous colour, soft and gliding camera movements, and mood lighting. “When you are in love with somebody, the light just hits them differently,” she says. “It was important for me to find the joy in the story. I’m interested in finding joy in places that we don’t normally see it in, because it does exist. And when you’re going through something so dramatic, you need hope to keep you moving forward. Because that’s what happened for me, and it’s human. And seeing it here means you see these people as humans, too.”

‘Dreamers’ is in cinemas