General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Dream in Another Language

I Dream in Another Language (Spanish: Sueño en otro idioma) is a 2017 Mexican drama-fantasy film directed by Ernesto Contreras and written by his brother Carlos Contreras, in which a young linguist tries to record the last living language of its kind by reconciling its remaining speakers, elderly men who have not spoken to each other in fifty years.¹ A Mexico-Netherlands co-production, it premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Sueño en otro idioma³
Director / writer	Ernesto Contreras (director); Carlos Contreras (screenplay), the two brothers and frequent collaborators¹
Principal cast	Fernando Álvarez Rebeil (Martín), Eligio Meléndez (Evaristo), José Manuel Poncelis (Isauro), Fátima Molina (Lluvia)¹
Production	Mexico-Netherlands co-production, 101 minutes, shot in San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz⁴^•⁵
Signature honor	Audience Award, World Cinema Dramatic, 2017 Sundance Film Festival (world premiere)²
Ariel Awards	2018 Silver Ariels for Best Film, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Sound, Original Score, and Best Actor (Eligio Meléndez)⁶
Reception	80% Tomatometer and 89% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes; Metascore 64; IMDb rating 7.4/10 from about 4,700 users¹^•⁷^•³
US release	Limited theatrical release July 28, 2017 through FilmRise; gross US box office $2.4K¹

Spoilers

Plot

Martín (Fernando Álvarez Rebeil), a young linguist from a state university, travels to a small settlement deep in the Veracruz rainforest to record Zikril, an indigenous language on the verge of extinction.¹^•⁵ Only two native speakers remain, Evaristo (Eligio Meléndez) and Isauro (José Manuel Poncelis), but the two men have not spoken to each other in fifty years, and their cooperation is essential for a recorded conversation.¹^•⁸ A third elderly speaker, a woman named Jacinta, dies shortly after Martín's arrival, raising the stakes of the documentation effort.⁴^•⁹

Martín connects with Evaristo's granddaughter Lluvia (Fátima Molina), who teaches English to village residents and hopes to start a new life in the United States, and the two work to bring the old rivals together.⁸^•⁴ As flashbacks peel back the origins of the grudge, the film reveals a secret past and a forbidden gay love story: Evaristo's concealed sexuality and his shame over his intimacy with Isauro caused their half-century of silence, with the apparent rivalry over a woman masking that relationship.²^•⁸^•¹² The film also moves into magic realism, including a mystical cave where Zikril speakers gather after they pass away, and scenes in which birds seem to respond as Zikril is spoken.⁴^•⁸

The invented language

Zikril is a fictional language created for the film. Director Ernesto Contreras explained the choice: "We decided not to use a real indigenous language out of respect for the speakers of these tongues that are disappearing."¹⁰ A linguist built the language from nothing, complete with its own grammar and sound system; Contreras had expected an adaptation of Zapotec, but the specialist delivered an entirely original construction, in which "chupi" means hello and "upibe" means friend.⁵ The actors received a Zikril manual along with their scripts, and José Manuel Poncelis, who plays Isauro, dedicated 15 hours a day for two weeks to learning its rules and intonation.⁵

The filmmakers also chose not to provide subtitles for much of the Zikril dialogue, a decision Frameline's festival notes describe as bold, adding a layer of mystery for viewers who, like Martín, cannot fully enter the language.⁴

Origins

The premise came from a news story. Producer Raymond van der Kaaij read an article claiming that the last two speakers of Ayapaneco, an indigenous language of Tabasco in southeastern Mexico, were feuding and thereby pushing the language toward extinction; he later met screenwriter Carlos Contreras at a festival in Greece and asked him to develop the story.⁵ Linguists who investigated concluded the reported feud was false, and the brothers used the supposed news as the starting point for what Contreras called "a total fiction."⁵ A Remezcla interview describes the inspiration as the last two speakers of the Zoque language in Tabasco; the two accounts differ on the language named, and El País identifies Ayapaneco as a dialect of Mixe.¹⁰^•⁵

The story also has a personal root: the Contreras brothers grew up in Veracruz listening to their paternal grandmother speak Zapotec, which as children they regarded with shame rather than pride; the film, Contreras said, is partly a dialogue with those who have gone, and a gift of an entire language to their grandmother.⁵

Themes and context

The film treats language loss as more than a communication problem. "The languages are disappearing. They are not just words; a language is also a way of seeing the world," Contreras told El País, noting that in Mexico 259 of the 364 linguistic variants that exist risk extinction, with migration, discrimination, and social and religious pressure among the threats.⁵ Critics identified parallel themes: Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film deals with language's power to unite, divide, create, and elevate, alongside memory, regret, and forgiveness, while The New York Times review pointed to cultural erasure and the way religious and provincial prejudices can suppress love.⁸^•⁷

Reception

Reception was broadly favorable with reservations about the storytelling. The film holds an 80% Tomatometer from 15 reviews and an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Metascore of 64 based on six critic reviews, three positive and three mixed.¹^•⁷ Positive reviews praised the film's mood and craft: Screen Daily credited Contreras and his regular cinematographer Tonatiuh Martínez with handling the spiritual musings so that "a beguiling mood" becomes as crucial as the backstory, and Turan called it "an unusual venture, both charming and serious," with more than a touch of magic realism.⁷ Mixed reviews found the treatment conventional: The Hollywood Reporter called it thought-provoking and visually compelling but said its themes were subordinated to bland treatment, and Slant Magazine wrote that stale narrative complications overtake the film's heady ideas.⁷

Awards

After its Sundance audience award, the film accumulated 15 wins and 22 nominations overall.⁶ At the 2018 Ariel Awards, Mexico's film prizes, it won Silver Ariels for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Actor (Eligio Meléndez).⁶^•¹¹ Other honors included the Audience Award for Best International Feature at the Florida Film Festival, the Press Award for Best Mexican Fiction Feature and a shared Best Actor award (Meléndez and Poncelis) at Guadalajara, Best Screenplay at the Huelva Latin American Film Festival, an Audience Choice Award at Minneapolis St. Paul, and the Jury Prize for Best Feature Film at Oslo/Fusion.⁶ Andrés Sánchez's song "Canción Zikril" won a Premio Canacine for Best Original Song in 2019.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2017 and 2018

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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