Dépayser
2018 · 7m · México
Directed by Guillermo Matthews
Genres: experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, surreal
A brief story follows a Mexican young woman in a love relationship full of translation problems with a French character who never appears on camera. The young woman shifts between photographer and sound recordist, between brown hair and red hair.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A love story where the lover never materializes, told through a woman's split identity and the friction of language itself—this is the kind of premise that makes you recalibrate what 'romance' even means. Matthews takes the experimental form seriously enough that it becomes the story, and that's exactly the subversive move most scouts would chicken out on.
The formal conceit—absence as presence, dual personas, the recording apparatus as proxy for intimacy—sits in deliberate conversation with structural cinema and the essay film, deployed with admirable restraint and compositional precision. It's a work aware of its own lineage and unafraid to challenge the viewer's expectations within that tradition.
The decision to keep the French lover completely off-camera while foregrounding the sound recordist's perspective transforms a straightforward long-distance narrative into something about labor, mediation, and the gaps that language creates—it's the kind of single structural choice that rewires how everything else lands.