Jonas Tarestad about the story of The Sailor’s Dream


Since a young age, I have been a frequent visitor of flea markets and thrift stores in search of oddities. Coincidentally, I think this activity peaked around the time we made The Sailor’s Dream. I bought old photo albums and a scrapbook filled with newspaper images of silent-era film stars. Whoever the woman who daydreamed about Rudolph Valentino was, she was long gone. The Sailor’s Dream had that same, kind of strange, sensation of opening someone else’s box of incomplete cherished memories, slightly haunting but nostalgic and warm. The narrative was deliberately fractured and vague. Fittingly, my recollections of the production are kind of hazy, whereas the production of Year Walk and DEVICE 6 are pretty clear in my memory.

To me, The Sailor’s Dream is about the sea, seen from land. Or land, seen from the sea. It’s about longing. A little girl in an institution, longs for a family, and a woman in a coastal village, pines for her lover – the sailor, who dreams back to a time before his big mistake. Together, they formed a melancholic fragmented story about three people who came together as a family and briefly had happiness.