A night on the job with a young Bulgarian woman who works as a prostitute along Zurich’s Sihlquai.

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Feature about an 18-year-old young woman from Bulgaria, who has left her daughter back home to work the formerly notorious pavement of Zurich’s Sihlquai as a prostitute. In this riveting episodic drama that takes place on Christmas Eve – while everyone else is caught up in “the season” – Mia tries to attract clients. Along the way, she meets a social worker who lives out her secret passion for S&M before going home to her husband in the suburbs. Mia also encounters an affluent homemaker whose husband is a notorious john and a shy, inhibited man who’s been left by his wife and rejected by his adult daughter.

The setting of Traumland is recognizably Zurich, while not figuratively tied to it. Instead, the effect is rather of a generalized, sad urban backdrop that is far from any postcard idyll. Traumland is a highly emotional but hypothermically staged relationship puzzle, an impressive feature debut by Swiss director and author Petra Volpe. The movie co-stars Spanish actress Marisa Paredes, best known from movies by Pedro Almodóvar; she impresses as a bourgeois widow looking for a relationship.