They All Lie

Filmmaker in person for Q&A!

Part of Latinbeat's spotlight on Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro.

A more abstract counterpart to The Stolen Man, Piñeiro’s second feature unleashes eight strong-willed characters into a clandestine plot involving art forgery, an unfinished novel, and Sarmiento’s U.S. journals, resulting in a giddy kaleidoscope of differing meaning that playfully channels the high postmodernism of William Gaddis. Piñeiro explores a cool stylistic restraint in They All Lie, deploying precise 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. (Harvard Film Archive)