Matías Piñeiro at a Q&A for Viola during this year's New Directors/New Films film festival. Photo: Samantha Thomas
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will showcase the work of Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro during the upcoming Latinbeat film festival (July 12 – 21) and will simultaneously open two of his films, Viola and Rosalinda, on July 12. Latinbeat will host the New York premiere of Piñeiro’s 2007 film The Stolen Man/El Hombre Robado and 2009 film They All Lie/Todos Mienten. All screenings of Viola at the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be followed by his short film Rosalinda. Of course, Piñeiro is no stranger to Film Society. Viola was part of the lineup from this past New Directors/New Films festival.
“Only 31, Matías Piñeiro has already established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary world cinema,” said Dennis Lim, Film Society's Director of Cinematheque Programming. “His playful, mysterious films, about the power of desire and of language draw freely on theater and literature while remaining fully cinematic, at times calling to mind the youthful works of the French New Wave masters Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. We are delighted to be tracing the evolution of Piñeiro’s career to date by supplementing the theatrical release of Viola with a complete retrospective of his work.”
Latinbeat will take place from July 12 – 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the complete lineup will be announced soon. Tickets for Viola and Rosalinda as well as Latinbeat will go on sale to Film Society members on June 18, and to the general public on June 20.
Films:
Rosalinda (2010, 43m)
A group of actors travel to an island in Tigre to rehearse William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Luisa, who plays Rosalind in the play, terminates a current romantic relationship over her cell phone. During preparations she alternates between rehearsing and daydreaming, and starts to slowly embody Rosalind, transforming into the object of desire of other cast members on the island. During those sun-soaked hours, love strikes between the players and the roles between actress and character confuse themselves in a rare mixing of joyful artifice and anguishing uncertainty.
The Stolen Man / El Hombre Robado (2007, 91m)
Piñeiro’s sparkling debut film breathlessly follows a clever, capricious young woman as she carefully interweaves friends and lovers into an intricate web of secretive yet often unexpectedly compassionate games. With its grainy 16mm black-and-white cinematography, its political sub-and super-texts, and its compelling portrait of impetuous youth, The Stolen Man recalls the alternately sober and sprightly nouvelle vague of Jean Eustache and Jacques Rivette.
They All Lie / Todos Mienten (2009, 75m)
Piñeiro’s second feature unleashes eight strong-willed characters into a clandestine plot involving art forgery, an unfinished novel and Sarmiento’s US journals, resulting in a giddy kaleidoscope of differed meaning that playfully channels the high postmodernism of William Gaddis. Piñeiro explores a cool stylistic restraint in They All Lie, deploying precision mise-en-scene to transform the rambling country house that is the film’s sole location into a series of inter-nested boxes and closets in which strange skeletons inevitably wait. With their zealous embrace of Sarmiento’s introspective writings, Piñeiro’s youthful and self-absorbed characters once again become the delightfully improbable vehicles for thoughtful reflections on the history of modern Argentina.
Viola (2012, 63m)
Piñeiro ingeniously fashions out of Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night a seductive roundelay among young actors and lovers in present-day Buenos Aires. Mixing melodrama with sentimental comedy, philosophical conundrum with matters of the heart, Viola bears all the signature traits of a Piñeiro film: serpentine camera movements and slippages of language, an elliptical narrative and a playful confusion of reality and artifice.
