Viola

Matías Piñeiro is one of contemporary Argentine cinema’s most sensuous and sophisticated new voices. In his latest film, Viola, he 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.

Screening with:

Rosalinda
Matías Piñeiro | Argentina | 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. But once rehearsals are over and everyone returns to reality, the romantic bliss between the cast members and their own partners awakens in her a, foolish and irrepressible, desire to long and hope for a phone call.