An affluent city is covered in snow, all seems perfect – on the surface. Divorcé Rolf is doing his best to rebuild his relationship with his daughter. Pregnant Lena appears to be living a faultless family life with her husband and son. Social worker Judith has a tough job and escapes it through her fantasies, whilst widowed Maria has finally built up the courage to invite her male acquaintance to a romantic dinner.
In the course of one day, all of them will cross paths with the Bulgarian Mia, who works in the red-light trade and their seemingly perfect lives will never be the same…

What drew you to this story - is it based on someone you know?

I lived in the red light district of Zürich and was always wondering about that parallel world of the sex business and ‘normal life’ around me. The women on the street touched me, I wondered about their lives. As a woman - unless working as a prostitute, you are excluded from this world and that alone somehow outraged me but also drew me to it.

When I was a student I worked as a telephone sex operator for a while. I needed money but I was also curious to know what was behind those telephone sex ads. I had the obvious conversations but I also talked a lot to the customers about their relationships, their sexual desires, fantasies - and it left a lasting impression on me.

How would you describe the film?

DREAMLAND is about how we treat the most vulnerable in our world and ultimately I believe this is linked to how we deal with our relationships. The people who meet Mia are not bad, they are just unable to deal with their own pain and I think that is very damaging. The more I came to know about the sex-business, the more it led me to questions about relationships in general, how we deal with issues of rejection, loneliness, betrayal, vulnerability, pain and yearning for intimacy and closeness.

How did you approach the subject?

My research for DREAMLAND took over a year and I got to talk to a lot of people involved in the red light world. I was in brothels, clubs and I spent time with the police etc. I was astonished about how much the clients were looking for something "real". ‘Real desire, real contact, real conversations’.

But I was most deeply moved by my encounters with the often very young girls from Eastern Europe who come to Switzerland on a three-months visa to work as street prostitutes. I met most of them through FIZ, Fachstelle Frauenhandel und Frauenmigration, an NGO that help women who have problems or who want to stop working as prostitutes. The FIZ does a tremendous work and they helped me a lot in my research.

When I asked these young women what would be important for them in such a movie they all said: they would like to be seen as human beings. This always stayed with me in the long process of developing the screenplay.