Dear Friend (May 2010)

I have just returned from a short film festival in Oberhausen. I spent three days there, submerged in the dark cinema, watching one projected image after the other. Going home, I take the train from Oberhausen to Copenhagen. Three different trains, but each time I am lucky enough to have a window seat. The train journey takes ten hours and I savour every second of it.

I spend all ten hours of my train journey just looking out of the window. Actually I am not really looking, I imagine pictures. Pictures that I am working on or future pictures that I would like to make. And I think about people I know: I think about you and I imagine you and me together. We talk, we do things together. It’s all there in the landscape.

Sometimes you describe an image of you and me together. You say: I could be there next to you. We say: We could do this together and at the same time we imagine it. We see a picture of us travelling together or shopping together or making a film together. It may never happen, but the shared image works like glue. We are in the same picture and it makes our bond stronger.

Last night, in a bar, I overheard a conversation between two people. They talked about travelling. They talked about travelling on a train, the gentleness of the train’s motion, how the landscape passes by the window and how the thoughts wander freely. The man told the woman about the Trans-Mongolian line, from Moscow to Beijing. “It takes a week,” he said, “and I wouldn´t mind being on that train with you”. There was a small pause and then she said, with a very quiet voice, and I had to listen carefully: “and I would like to go with you.” At this moment, I imagined that they were both imagining a picture of them together on the train.