The Dream Catcher

Freddy (played by Maurice Compte, well known from NYPD Blue) looks sombre. He calls his pregnant girlfriend. ‘Where are you? You haven’t been home in days’, she says reproachfully. Freddy finds himself in Philadelphia and mutters that he will be home soon. At the start of The Dream Catcher he has lost all his things while trying to climb on a freight train. Later he looks out of the window and sees a boy escape from a bus with juvenile delinquents. Not long after that, fate brings them together again when he meets Albert, as the 15-year-old rascal is called, in a roadside diner. They talk some about why they are on the road. They don’t tell each other much at first. Freddy is looking for his uncle, from whom he hopes to get information about the whereabouts of his father he has lost contact with. Albert (Paddy Connor) is looking for his mother, even though he only has a postcard of a restaurant. Together they set out, like nomads in a sombre America, navigating between the farmers, Indians, born-again Christians, alcoholics and (pseud-)soldiers, on their way to the West: Oklahoma and then Las Vegas. The Dream Catcher is moving without being sentimental. It is a road movie, shot on countless locations, that never loses sight of its purpose: in this personal film Radtke is interested in the question of what choices two kids from broken families have to escape from their fate.