Like a Dream

(74 minutes, 2024)

Rosefsky Gallery - October 9th - November 6th, 2025

Third Space screening - December 1st, 2024

Images Vevey Biennale - September 7th - 29th, 2024

Roxy Cinema screening - June 21st, 2024

apartamento - short film about the making of

An experimental and parodic film, Like a Dream retraces Marianna Rothen's 17-year career in modeling. After becoming a photographer/ filmmaker, she spent three years making

this autobiographical behind-the-scenes feature film. The film tells the humorous story of a teenager who left home in the late 1990s to become an international model. Through bizarre,

caricatured stagings, Rothen embodies the figure of the "Young Girl". Her character, confronted by an environment obsessed with perfection, faces abuse of power and depression.

Creating a mise en abyme, the Canadian artist moves among a multitude of plastic mannequins. She animates them like puppets in scenes evoking this dream life. Demystifying the

glamour of catwalks and glossy magazine pages, Like a Dream functions as an intimate diary and authentic testimony to an experience lived between dream and reality.

TRAILER:

“Being a model was some kind of mystery. Who got to be the one people liked? I didn’t think of myself as pretty. My long limbs got in the way. I tripped and stumbled a lot,

sometimes at those first castings and sometimes on the runway. Often, I wore the wrong outfit and would get into trouble. My voice was quiet, afraid I’d say the wrong thing.

Anytime I got a job or someone made a fuss, I thought, ‘Little old me?’ I tried to let them mould me into the person they wanted me to be. It took a long time; I was not as fast as the

others. I would cry sometimes at the agency because I didn’t understand what they meant when they told me to clean up my look. They would say, ‘You need to look glamorous, you

need to be chic and dress a little sexy, add some va-va-voom!’

The only thing I had was my photography. I instinctively knew this was something I wanted to document. This experience I couldn’t put into words held a future out in front of me like a

carrot. Taking photos, I learnt, was something I could use to connect with people. If I wanted to be someone’s friend, I would ask if I could take their picture. The girls liked me because I

was one of them. They could be themselves, they didn’t have to be sexy or glam. Photography gave me direction and purpose. Maybe I would’ve been a better model had I not cared

so much about this thing that felt like rebellion. But to me, the success of my career is these photographs and the places they’ve brought me to to be able to make my film.”

PHOTOGRAPHS: