Although she lived in France for many years, Fina Torres returned to Venezuela to make her first film, a story of three generations on a Venezuelan hacienda. She comments, “Documents were not necessary to draw up those Venezuelan women from the twenties or the forties. They had always lived in very closed communities. Little girls are traditionally brought up by their grandmothers or their great-aunts. Those old women usually hand down what they learned from life by telling stories. The story of the movie itself--if we consider it as a story--tells us about this handing down. A woman replaces another one, a destiny succeeds to another destiny and so on. Women are shown like the keepers of memory.”
“After twenty years of absence, Marie goes back to the hacienda where she spent some days of her adolescence. While searching the house, rediscovering the shadows, the double games, the pretenses of that time, Marie becomes again the anxious little girl who rushed down the staircases, forced the safes, brought to light the memories of Aunt Oriane, thus taking possession of a strange inheritance. By fragments, in the setting which is--little by little--reconstructed, the characters who inhabited her aunt's childhood appear and disappear... A Father...a servant, Fidelia...and Serge, Oriane's stepbrother... Carefully scattered around the hacienda by Oriane herself, the scraps of the past reassemble before Marie's eyes... A forbidden love...hints of violence...and, still present as a refrain, Oriane's obsessive lust.” Arion Productions
Oriana received the Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It was also featured in the San Francisco and New York Film Festivals this fall.