Drowning in Dreams

Drowning in Dreams enters the dark and illusory world of one man's obsession. A story of greed and redemption, guilt and death, the film charts the course of a fatal dream as Fred Broennle plumbs the chilly depths of Lake Superior in a quest to raise the luxury steam yacht Gunilda. Run aground and sunk in 1911, with no loss of life and barely an afterthought by her wealthy American owners, Gunilda sat virtually intact in three hundred feet of water until one weekend in 1970, when Broennle and his diving instructor and partner Charles King Hague set out to find her. The fabulous wreck would soon cost Broennle a fortune, cause the death of King Hague, and change his own life forever. Torn between the duelling forces of greed and guilt over his partner's drowning, Broennle plunges into an hallucinatory lifetime project to raise Gunilda from the freezing waters. As his struggle becomes more and more desperate, we meet his son Tug, who, though deeply jealous of Fred's fixation on Gunilda, is himself drawn further and further into the web of his father's obsession.