Index. Viola (2012) Review by:Carson Lund Before the brain even begins to do its work on Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro’s seemingly elusive, knotty film Viola, a flood of sensual treats hit the retinas and ear canals. For one, there is Piñeiro’s nearly constant shallow depth of field and soft autumnal lighting, dispersing the plane of view into a cloud of lovely colors and faces. Perhaps even less ignorable is the gorgeous Agustina Muñoz, who plays Cecilia and has one of the richest, most sensual speaking voices I’ve ever heard, a lush river of effortless tongue rolls, spiky consonants and smooth vowels. Muñoz’s voice is lent an extra shimmer by an expansive all-diegetic sound mix that emphasizes the kind of cozy, intimate sounds we hear when pressed up against another person. Piñeiro’s camera, meanwhile, edges lovingly close to his characters as they pirouette around one another and shift depths in the frame with the kind of fluid but unshowy choreography regularly seen in a Hou Hsiao-hsien film.
Matías Piñeiro Interview (Viola, They All Lie) | The Seventh Art: A Video Magazine About Cinema. Matías Piñeiro is an Argentinian filmmaker who has directed three feature films and one 40-minute short, which was commissioned for the Jeonju Digital Project. His first two films, The Stolen Man (2007) and They All Lie (2009), introduce the games played with narrative, the engagement with the relationship between film and literature, and the interest in artistic communities that exist throughout his uniformly strong filmography, which is equal parts formally complex and lightly comedic exploration of human behaviour.
Matías brought his latest film, Viola, to the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Like Rosalinda (2011) before it, Viola is an adaptation of a Shakespeare play – As You Like It and Twelfth Night, respectively – and part of a planned look at the female roles of Shakespeare’s comedies. We were absolutely thrilled to invite Matías to our studio space, hosted by Onsite [at] OCAD U, to discuss every single one of his films at length. The Cinema of Matias Piñeiro: As You Like It. The latest of the talented young-ish filmmakers to emerge from the independent film culture of southern South America, 31-year-old Matias Piñeiro arrives here with what seems to be a fully developed style and distinct set of interests. “El hombre robado” (The Stolen Man, 2007), a sort of romantic farce set in a museum from which the characters are pilfering antiquities, and “Todos mienten” (They All Lie, 2009), which conflates art forgery with fiction-making and the historical record, are showing this weekend, July 13 and 14, as part of the Latinbeat series at Lincoln Center.
Set in a vague urban bohemian milieu, they evoke Jacques Rivette or early Raul Ruiz in their elaborate, literary conspiracy games and Eric Rohmer in their fondness for talkative young people, mainly women. To act is to act in this world. “Instead of rooting stories in the soil of the real,” Dennis Lim writes in the current Artforum, Piñeiro’s films “emphasize the alchemical properties of fiction.” Read more J. 20 Directors to Watch - Multimedia Feature. Strange Capers: Wordplay with Matías Piñeiro. Matías Piñeiro at New Directors/New Films. Photo: Samantha Thomas Among the diverse array of films on offer, this year's Latinbeat film festival will feature a special spotlight on the exciting work of young Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro.
His films The Stolen Man and They All Lie will be screening this weekend, while his most recent film, Viola (ND/NF '13), will be playing with the short Rosalinda in an extended theatrical run starting Friday. His talky, female-centric films explore theater and literature, using the works of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Argentina's seventh president) and William Shakespeare.
The filmmaker, who currently resides in New York, spoke with FilmLinc Daily about filming the supposedly uncinematic, his process of creating a film, and the challenges and creativity of the act of translation. Your films often focus on written texts and on theater. Because I think the opposite. I try not to think in national terms because those limits are less interesting.
Latinbeat Goes Mad for Matías. Posted by Tiffany Vazquez on May 21, 2013 in Announcements • Latinbeat • Film Society 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. "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.
Films: The L Magazine - New York City's Local Event and Arts & Culture Guide. Cinemas and national cinemas | Cinética (in English) Abrir Puertas y Ventanas (2011), by Milagros Mumenthale Abrir Puertas y Ventanas, by Milagros Mumenthaler (Argentina, 2011); Viola, by Matias Piñeiro (Argentina, 2012)by Filipe Furtado There’s no worse scenario for a national cinema than becoming a genre. The apparent gains with international financing and selection to the world’s main film festivals are followed by an asphyxia that dominates every film, with the exception of those few gifted with enough personality to resist the pre-approved shortcuts (one can think about the calcification of Romenian cinema these past few years).
This is a very perceivable issue with recent Argentinean cinema, with films like El Custodio (Rodrigo Moreno), La Rabia (Albertina Carri) or El Otro (Ariel Rotter) revealing themselves as almost interchangeable in their adherence to the same two or three pre-established procedures. Viola (2012), by Matias Piñeiro None of these things are even cause of debate in Viola. TIFF 2012. Correspondences #6 on Notebook. Above: Viola. Dear Fern, With the De Palma and Anderson, and then later the films by Bellocchio and Malick, defining “direction” indeed has become a key discussion point at the festival this year. Bellocchio's Dormant Beauty, as you indicate, is the special case: quite simply he directs the shit out of that movie. The screenplay and “hot button” topic are structural and political fodder for introducing and then orchestrating and nimbly evolving this engrossing melodrama of morality, Catholicism, contemporary Italian politics, media images and multiple characters across churches, hospitals, mansions, clandestine government backrooms, television performances, protests and seedy motel rooms.
The film was compulsive; it was impossible not to get caught up in its energetic valences. This obviously is not rare for Malick, but To the Wonder is the least grounded of all his work. I know you've seen some work by masters in the meantime and am looking forward to your thoughts on them! Where More Meets MORE: The 37th Toronto International Film Festival. “Where OMG Meets WTF”. This was the first tagline I spotted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Others included “Where Fantasy Meets Reality”, “Where Indie Meets Epic”, “Where Wow Meets Huh?” And “Where Seeing Meets Believing”. In other words, TIFF’s continuing mission to be the “all things for all people” film festival has now been written into its public relations. Unlike other major film festivals, TIFF has never put a high premium on jury awards. Along with its many premieres, Toronto also hosted the first North American stops for a number of high profile films that had already played in Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and Venice.
The End of Visions The most significant programming change at TIFF this year was the folding of the Visions section into Wavelengths. Wavelengths: Features Leviathan Three Sisters Two hours into Wang Bing’s Three Sisters, the best of the feature-length fall premieres in Wavelengths, there’s a shot that recalls his previous film, The Ditch (2010). Viola. Viola. The phrase "deceptively simple" gets tossed around a lot, usually as a way of signifying that something large and ostentatious can be pared down into a more essential non-complexity.
It's tempting to call Viola "deceptively simple. " But in truth, the film merits an opposing, if perhaps even more redundant, superlative. Both its effortless pleasure and the budding mastery of Argentine director Matías Piñeiro proceed, in no small part, from structural subtlety. Viola is deceptively complex. Piñeiro's third feature unfolds in present-day Buenos Aires, though the city itself takes a backseat. Unlike fellow South American upstart Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose impressive debut Neighboring Sounds, is almost neurotically attentive to the pulse (and, especially, the sound design) of urban experience, Piñeiro seems more drawn to the private experiences of his mostly female cast. After an establishing shot tracking Villar on her bicycle, Viola cuts rather abruptly to its cast of thespians. In ‘Viola,’ Shakespeare Is Lens to Look at Young Argentines. Berlin: A Winter’s Tale: The 65th Berlin International Film Festival.
It was in the sad month of February,When the days had become dreary,And when the wind whipped at the trees,That I made my way to Germany. And when I to the border came,I felt a mighty hammeringIn my breast, I even thinkMy eyes welled with tears. And when the German tongue I heard,I had the strangest sensation;It felt as underwent my heartA pleasing exsanguination – Heinrich Heine Attending a film festival, as I have had cause to note in the past, is essentially a grand act of montage. So there may be no more appropriate site for a film festival than Berlin, a city which, itself, seems to have been constructed with montage principles in mind. Nowhere else do different historical eras brush up against each other so strikingly.
Mit der 41 in die Stadt. Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Pankow? There was, sad to say, no Turin Horse in this year’s edition of the festival. Gloria Torheit, du regierst die Welt, und dein Sitz ist ein schöner, weiblicher Mund. Camille Claudel, 1915. New Directors/New Films Festival Shows the Future.
Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki A scene from the documentary "People's Park," directed by Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki. More Photos » ‘OUR NIXON’ (Closing Night Selection) After Lincoln — and for mostly antithetical reasons — Richard M. Apart from some old news clips, most of the images come from Super-8 home movies shot, starting just after the 1968 election, by Dwight Chapin, H. ‘PEOPLE’S PARK’ It’s surprising how infrequently the great masses of humanity that pass through “People’s Park” seem to notice the camera.
Directed by Libbie D. ‘UPSTREAM COLOR’ Shane Carruth’s first feature, “Primer,” was the festival-circuit cult object of 2004: a haunting, puzzling time-travel movie that explored a science-fiction conceit with daunting intellectual rigor and a minuscule budget. While the plot is teasingly oblique, the premise evokes the early, body-horror films of David Cronenberg. Mr. Viola. Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On Adam Nayman on Viola In trying to choose a movie for this symposium, I flirted with several titles that have already stood the decennial test of time before settling on something that hasn’t yet been released commercially. This is partially because I’m leery of parroting received wisdom, but also because I want to show the importance of remaining wide awake to new experiences. Which is funny, because the first time I saw Viola—a film I’ve now watched three times—I was with a friend who fell asleep about halfway through the movie.
And because I noticed her nodding off out of the corner of my eye, I only later realized that I missed a shot of one of the character doing the exact same thing—quietly conking out while her companion is lost in a book. It’s also the prelude to one of the most quietly amazing dream sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie, even if on that first viewing I didn’t realize that it even was a dream sequence at all. Viola - Critics Round Up. Piñeiro unearths every bit of thought and feeling contained in this mercurial feature’s brief running time, from the melancholy images of Viola pedaling her bike through the city to the free rein he gives his mostly female ensemble to create memorably individuated characters.
(A brilliant rehearsal scene between two troupe members—very Rivette-like in its conception and execution—suggests depths of emotion that go far beyond the words being read.) This sensation of pleasant confusion recurs throughout Viola, which might be described as an ensemble romantic comedy but at the same time doesn’t seem beholden to any genre. Argentinean director Matías Piñero’s sophomore feature dares to disorient its audience from the first scene onward. But it’s not an obtuse film. Although it is filled with mysteries, it is not asking to be decoded. Instead, Viola invites us to submit to its pleasures, which are ample and ultimately very simple. More Links Artinfo: J. Viola | Film | Movie Review. Two different Violas inhabit the Argentine romantic comedy Viola, one of them considerably more interesting than the other.
The audience is first introduced to the members of an all-female theater company performing a modified version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one of whom (Elisa Carricajo) has just decided to break up with her boyfriend. Backstage, the women argue good-naturedly about the pros and cons of constancy; after Carricajo leaves, the most ardent of the group (Agustina Muñoz) decides to test her friend’s resolve, along with various theories about romance, by presenting her with a smitten alternative—namely, herself.
A virtuoso rehearsal sequence follows, in which Muñoz, playing Viola (who’s disguised as a man), gradually seduces Carricajo, playing Olivia, as they go over lines from Act I, Scene V. That intensity is precisely what’s missing from the remainder of the film, which all but abandons Carricajo and the enticing, multilayered story it’s begun. Joshua Reviews Matias Pineiro’s Viola [Theatrical Review] Apparently Joss Whedon isn’t the only director with an affinity for adapting works from The Bard. With the Avengers director back in 2013 with his (fantastic) take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night gets a day in the spotlight thanks to Argentinian filmmaker Matias Pineiro and his equally great new picture, Viola.
However, it’s not the straight adaptation one would expect from a director taking on one of the greatest literary voices in history. Clocking in at a taut 65 minutes, Pineiro’s film tells the story of a group of actors, and their romances while staging a performance of The Bard’s classic. We meet Viola, the closest thing the film has to a real lead, a member of Buenos Aires’ bohemian set, and also the delivery system for bootleg DVDs that her boyfriend copies for customers. Pineiro’s third feature film, Viola is a provocative and free-spirited meditation on romance and the relationships being woven by this singular theater troupe. Visual Vagabond: The Films of Matías Piñeiro on Notebook. Interview: Matías Piñeiro. Role Models: The Films of Matías Piñeiro - Cinema Scope. Viola: movie review | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie release date. Error: Internal Error. Matías Piñeiro's Midsummer Dream. Films directed by Matías Piñeiro. Rhythm and Word: Exploring the Films of Matías Piñeiro.
Matías Piñeiro by Clinton Krute.