Film Screening: I Dream in Another Language

Join the Rose Art Museum for a screening of director Ernesto Contreras’s 2017 film I Dream In Another Language. Winner of the Sundance Institute / Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award, this Mexican drama chronicles the efforts of a young linguist to document and preserve a disappearing indigenous language. Called “delectably watchable” (The New York Times), this beautiful poetic film raises philosophical questions about what is lost when a language—and, by extension, our elders’ memory—is allowed to fade unpreserved. 

WATCH THE TRAILER

I Dream in Another Language, 2017. Dir. Ernesto Contreras. 100 minutes; Presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Courtesy of Gussi Cinema.

FILM SYNOPSIS

Martin, a young linguist, travels to the rainforest of Veracruz, Mexico, to try to record and understand Zikril, an indigenous language dying in the region. The language's last two speakers quarreled in the past and haven't spoken to each other in over 50 years. Martín will undertake the challenge to bring the old friends back together and convince them to talk to each other so he can obtain a recorded registration of the language and study it. However, hidden in the past, in the depths of the jungle, lies a secret concealed by the language that makes it difficult to believe that the heart of Zikril will beat once again.

Run time: 100 minutes; Presented in Spanish with English subtitles.

This program was held in conjunction with the exhibition Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers, March 13–June 16, 2024, and co-sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences Co-Curricular Fund.