VERSION FRANCAISE FRENCH VERSION
Maya Da-Rin

2011
20 min
French with subtitles

Promotion : Snow
Producer: Le Fresnoy
Artistic advisor: Patrick Corillon

Genre : fiction
Themes : language, translation, exil

Synopsis: A man and a woman of different nationalities spend an evening together in a hotel room. In this impersonal surrounding, where people pass by without leaving any trace, the two characters try to communicate in a language they do not master. We don’t know almost nothing about their lives or how they got this place. They are foreigners in that country and strangers one to another.
French Version has its departing point in the dialogues of certain iconic French films that propose a particular use of the word in relation to image. The film follows a trivial situation, recurring in cinema: a man and a woman of different nationalities spend an evening together in a hotel room. The two characters, who we can see only through their reflex on the surface of a window, wander through the codes of a language they do not master. At this moment of dusk, what we can see is at the same time foreign and familiar. A barrier is always present, even if it is transparent like the surface of a window. The title refers to the term used for foreign films dubbed in French, when presented in French cinemas.

Maya Da-Rin was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1979. Her work as a filmmaker includes the documentaries The World Tilts to Here and Margin, both awarded by the Itaú Cultural Institute, and Lands, her first feature-length film. Her films were programmed at several film festivals and museums worldwide, as the 63rd Film Festival Locarno, Switzerland; 52nd Leipzig Film Festival, Germany; 25th Guadalajara International Film Festival, Mexico; 33rd São Paulo International Film Festival, Brazil; 29th Festival del Nuevo Cine Latino Americano, Cuba; 29th São Paulo Art Biennial, and the museums MoMA and New Museum, New York. In October 2010, she joined as a resident artist the Studio National des Arts Contemporains Le Fresnoy (France).