"Whileyouweresleeping" tells the stories of a series of forgotten characters in New York City. As the film maps out the geography of the blocks and tenements, from the Belt Parkway to Hell's Kitchen and beyond, each separate episode uncovers a life of someone in the shadows, ignored and past by. It is a world of homocide detectives and drug dealers, of homeless addicts and emergency room nurses, transvestites, prostitutes and pimps, of broken homes and lonely hearts. From each dark episode hope, not fear or anger, seems to triumph. Though they may be in the "gutter" these people each choose, in their own way, to look up, whilst so many of us choose to look away. At once darkly disturbing and uplifting, the film is a poem to a city and the connections we all have to each other.