Dreamland
Ivan Sen | Australia/USA 2009 | 94 min
Dan Freeman is an obsessive UFO hunter, alienated by life. Dan has left his wife, his Las Vegas home and his former world behind.
Living out of his Ford Bronco, he drives the desert roads surrounding AREA 51, the secret American military base in Nevada. His Bronco is dwarfed by the scale of the mountains and the endless road ahead.
Spellbound by dreams of galactic journeys to new worlds Dan is slowly hypnotised by the desert, his passage of time eroded.
Constantly searching the skies for contact, binoculars hanging from his neck, he is a space traveller, on the ultimate quest. Searching for the highway to the heavens.
His wife April, arrives in the desert to find him. She is haunted by a sense of loss and of life forgone. April searches for a sense of truth within herself, to reconcile her intentions.
Dan totally alone, craves the fulfillment of undefined desire. The isolation of the desert and his vivid nightly dreams induce a profound intimacy with the natural world—he surrenders to its beauty and power.
He finds himself on the border of reality, at the edge of the restricted zone of AREA 51 – the world’s most mysterious space of non existence—Codenamed: Dreamland.
Dreamland is a unique quest for purity and meaning, connected to our fear of what may be “out there” in the cosmos, and also ‘within’, when our essential aloneness is confronted.
Dreamland has changed me forever, as a filmmaker and a person. And I will always carry it within me.—Ivan Sen, director
