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Exclusive: Chiara Mastroianni (Marcello Mio), Denis Podalydès (Sorry Angel), Guslagie Malanda (Dossier 137), Jasmine Trinca (La Storia), Cleo Diára (I Only Rest In The Storm), Isabél Zuaa (The Secret Agent), and Agustina Muñoz (Ariel) are set to lead feature Jealous White Men, which Magnify is launching for the Cannes market.

Filming is set to begin later this year in Galápagos, Portugal, Brazil, and Italy on director Ivan Granovsky’s adventure-tragicomedy. The film is co-written by Granovsky and Mariana Ricardo (Grand Tour). Cinematography is by Simone D’Arcangelo (The Settlers). Additional casting is in process.

The synopsis reads: “Jealous White Men is a wild, tragicomic adventure that satirizes history through dueling narratives by Jules Verne and his wife Honorine, each recounting young Charles Darwin’s journey to the Galápagos — a voyage teeming with pirates, pink iguanas, and a riotous mix of chaos, discovery, and revolt.”

Magnify is handling global and U.S.

In You Burn Me, the Argentinian littérateur-filmmaker Matías Piñeiro uses his vintage Bolex camera like the iOS Notes app. Shooting over the course of a few years, his method involved “collecting” images here and there amidst teaching jobs on two continents, and in real locations referenced in the texts he’s adapting, as well as places imitating them. Whilst his work has always contended with classical literary texts’ relevance in the present day, his latest meditates more urgently on film form, specifically how the 16mm-shot and co-op-made ’60s avant-garde canon can be modernized. Like Sappho’s Ancient Greek poetry––his other principal concern here––his rushes need to be represented as countless, gleaming fragments, with a sprawling file database subbing for the poet’s parchment.

All of which is to say there’s a productive tension when Piñeiro attempts to fashion his literary sources into cinema: never just acted-out physically or maintained through voice-over,...

Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me is an intimate, impressionistic adaptation of the “Sea Foam” section from Italian modernist poet Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. It’s one of several segments from Pavese’s 1947 book that stages a philosophical dialogue between figures of Greek mythology.

“Sea Form” specifically imagines a conversation between Sappho (Gabriela Saidón), the lyric poet of Lesbos, and the mountain nymph Britomartis (María Villar). They have much to discuss, both having thrown themselves into the sea—the former out of unrequited desire for the ferryman Phaon, the latter to escape the unwanted attentions of Minos. Splicing in a handful of Sappho’s surviving fragmentary poems and a parallel story that follows a lovestruck biology student (Maria Inês Conçalves), Piñeiro expands Pavese’s dialogue into an intertextual conversation on the nature of love and desire, death and memory, silence and expression.

Poetry, not a fundamentally narrative medium,...

Can anyone forget the transfixing mysteries of Lois Patiño’s 2023 film, “Samsara”? The director is back with a new feature, “Ariel,” which recently premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Harbour section. The film is a disarmingly playful, free-wheeling strum on representation and reality. It’s lit by a spirit of surreal mischief, as Agustina Muñoz playing herself travels to an island for a production of “The Tempest,” where everyone is locked in a sort of Shakespeare-mania.

HighOnFilms’ Debanjan Dhar caught up with Patiño to discuss Ariel’s metatextual riffs, collaborations with Matías Piñeiro and Ion De Sosa, and bringing Shakespeare into the fold of everyday in the Azores. Edited excerpts from the conversation:

Debanjan: Could you speak about creating the conceit of the ferry where somewhere midway all passengers except Ariel fall into deep sleep? When did that conceit, as the first entry point into that strange,...

A few years back, directors Lois Patiño and Matías Piñeiro joined forces for what was meant to be a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The resulting short, Sycorax, felt like the meeting of two kindred spirits. Piñeiro’s ability to resuscitate the Bard’s texts and graft them onto present-day settings met with Patiño’s keen eye for the otherworldly. The story of a fictional cineaste (Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz) who roams the Azores in search of a woman to play the eponymous witch from The Tempest, Sycorax oozed both the playfulness of Piñeiro’s “Shakespeareads” and the sensual, hypnotic aura of Patiño’s Red Moon Tide or Samsara. It was that rare joint project whose two directors worked in perfect symbiosis, each playing to the other’s strengths.

Based on an original idea by Piñeiro and Patiño, through written and directed by the latter only, Ariel...

Right from the opening of Lois Patiño’s endlessly beguiling new film “Ariel,” reality is ruptured. The sky and the sea are mottled with a purple glow. The camera shifts its gaze to a troupe of performers on the shores. It’s a Shakespeare play; there’s a rapt audience watching. Agustina Muñoz plays herself, an actress whom the troupe has tapped to play Ariel from The Tempest.

Set in the Azores, she travels to an island to partake in a production. However, a heightened air of the uncanny sets in on the ferry trip itself. Suddenly, everyone aboard except Agustina slips into sleep, as if hexed. It gets even more confounding when she reaches the island. Each of its inhabitants is a Shakespeare character. Agustina is baffled. She thinks they are all playing some trick on her. But they refuse to shake off their performative air.

It’s everywhere she goes,...

Lights On has secured international sales rights to “Ariel,” the latest feature from acclaimed Galician director Lois Patiño, whose previous work “Samsara” tripped out audiences at the Berlin Film Festival. The film is set to make its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam(IFFR) on Feb. 11, screening in the Harbour section, a platform for bold and innovative contemporary cinema.

“Ariel” tells the story of Agustina Muñoz, an Argentine actress who arrives on the Azores Islands to perform in a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” with the Galician theater company Voadora.

However, after a strange incident on the ferry over, she notices peculiar behavior among the island’s inhabitants. Guided by a mysterious girl named Ariel, the actress navigates a surreal landscape where reality and fantasy blur, creating an ambiguous, dreamlike world.

The film is a Spain-Portugal co-production by Filmika Galaika and Bando à Parte, shot on location in the Azores.

Argentine director Matías Piñeiro has long been intrigued by the challenge of adapting literary works for the screen. In his latest film You Burn Me, he finds inspiration in the sparse yet evocative fragments of poetry left to us from ancient Greek lyrical poet Sappho.

Living in the 7th century BC on the island of Lesbos, Sappho wrote verses infused with longing, often focused on themes of love, desire and relationships between women. While the majority of her original writings are lost to time, they cement her place among history’s most significant poets.

Piñeiro’s film grapples with Sappho’s legacy, using her surviving words as a starting point to meditate on life’s biggest mysteries. At the core of You Burn Me is a chapter from Italian author Cesare Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò.

It imagines a conversation between Sappho and the nymph Britomartis atop restless ocean waves,...

Lois Patiño, one of the leading lights of the New Galician Cinema in Spain, is putting the final touches to “Ariel,” the highly anticipated follow up to his critically-acclaimed feature ”Samsara” which has secured distribution in more than a dozen territories and won a Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale Encounters 2023.

A contemporary and playful reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” from the perspective of the character Ariel, the feature, produced by Spain’s Filmika Galaika with Portugal’s Bando à Parte, will be sneak-peeked for the first time ever at the inaugural Ecam Forum co-production market, set to run June 10-14 in Madrid.

Producer Beli Martínez said more than 80% of the financing is locked via broadcasting partners Rtp in Portugal, Tvg in Galicia, Spain, public funders Agadic in Galicia and Spanish federal agency Icaa and Turismo de Portugal.

At Ecam Forum, she will be looking for post-production financing, distribution and sales.

Screen shines a light on 30 European titles that look set to grab the attention of festival directors in 2023, including new features by Tom Tykwer, Paz Vega, Paolo Sorrentino, Cecilia Verheyden and Baltasar Kormakur.

For our separate list of French festival hopefuls for 2024, click here.

Ariel (Sp-Por)

Dir. Lois Patiño

Patiño won the Encounters special jury prize at Berlin last year for Samsara and picked up the emerging director prize at Locarno in 2013 with Coast Of Death. His latest is a free adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, shot in Galicia and The Azores islands. Ariel stars Goya winner Irene Escolar...

Underscoring a renaissance on Spain’s genre scene, a duo of titles – Daniel Calparsoro’s “All the Names of God” and Carlota Pereda’s “The Chapel” – lead the lineup of the second Spanish Screenings on Tour, which unspools at Rome’s Mia forum, taking place Oct. 9-13.

A platform of market premieres, projects, pics in post and potential remake titles, the Spanish Screenings also underscore the ever stronger emergence in Spain of open arthouse titles – Isaki Lacuesta’s “Saturn Return,” Arantxa Echeverría “Chinas,” Benito Zambrano’s “Jumping the Fence” and Gerardo Herrero’s “Under Therapy,” which was one of the best-selling titles at March’s Malaga Spanish Screenings.

With titles in Next from Spain set to present trailers, Spanish Screenings on Tour will also position a bevy of anticipated feature debuts, at different stages of production, from Spain’s seemingly bottomless well of new talent, such as Jaume Claret Muxart.

Argentina’s Aleph Cine, led by Fernando Sokolowicz, one of the country’s most established film producers, has taken an undisclosed co-production stake in Romina Paula’s project “Gente de noche” (“People by Night”), produced by New Argentine Cinema icon Diego Dubcovsky at Varsovia Films.

Selected for San Sebastian Festival’s 9th Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, “Gente” marks Paula’s return to the Spanish festival after winning the 2019 Horizontes Award with her feature debut “Again Once Again” and co-directing 2020 Official Section omnibus player “Unlimited Edition.”

Toplining Agustina Muñoz (“Viola”) and Margarita Molfino (“Wild Tales”), the project follows Agustina, a woman who travels with her newborn baby to Selva Misionera to meet her wife’s family.

Selva Misionera owes its name to the Jesuit missions that began in the 17th Century in Guaraní territory -comprising current northeastern Argentina plus Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil- by the Society of Jesus to evangelize the region.

Matias Piñeiro’s Isabella opens with nested rectangles of resplendent color, creeping across the chromatic spectrum, oscillating between darkness and light, and then settling on purple, a visual analogue to equilibrium, as we’re informed by a voiceover. This sort of interdisciplinary filmmaking–it’s later clear that these geometrically presented hues are part of an installation work–adds a new wrinkle to Piñeiro’s already extracurricular filmmaking. For the past decade, the director has transposed (“adapt” is too exact and limiting a term) Shakespeare in contemporary Buenos Aires, where performance is yet another casual layer of obfuscation in films that slip between the crevices of the larger, everyday world of the film, and the play within. In keeping with this playful inscrutability, films like Viola (2012) and The Princess of France (2014) are enveloped in a hazy color palette, lit with phosphorescent stage lights and punctuated by intimate closeups that emerge from scattered shadows.

Joel Coen and Steven Spielberg aren’t the only filmmakers drawing from William Shakespeare as of late. Matías Piñeiro, who has playfully done so for much of his career, beautifully expands his filmography with Isabella, which arrives this month following stops at Berlinale and NYFF. Ahead of a theatrical release on August 27 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and on September 3 at LA’s Laemmle Royal, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer and poster, courtesy Cinema Guild.

In the film, Mariel (María Villar) longs to play the role of Isabella in a local theater troupe’s production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, but money problems prevent her from preparing for the audition. She thinks of asking her brother for financial help, but is worried about being too direct. Her solution is to ask her brother’s girlfriend, Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), also an actress and a more self-assured one,...

Exclusive: Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights to Matías Piñeiro’s Isabella which won a special jury mention in the Encounters section at the 70th Berlinale earlier this year. A 2021 theatrical release is being planned.

Isabella follows Mariel (María Villar) who wants to play the role of Isabella in a local theater troupe’s production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, but money problems prevent her from preparing for the audition. She thinks of asking her brother for financial help, but is worried about being too direct. Her solution is to ask her brother’s girlfriend, Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), also an actress and a more self-assured one, to convince her brother to give her the money. Luciana agrees on the condition that Mariel will not abandon her acting and continue to prepare for the part of Isabella.

“We can’t wait for audiences to be enchanted by Matías’ latest,...

Above: Light in the TropicsOne moment in Paula Gaitán’s seventh feature, Light in the Tropics, which premiered in Berlin in the Forum section, contains a visual key to the entire work. It’s an inverted image of the vast landmass, created by the camera obscura. Gaitán’s ambitious project draws not so much on literal parallels as loose continuities between the environs of contemporary New York and the Hudson Valley and Brazil’s Mato Grosso, including Pantanal, and up the Xingu River, into the Amazon. That continuity between two vastly distant locations is established mostly through the experiences of the areas’ indigenous communities. It’s also a connection that envisions a symbolic line leading from today’s artists—particularly a young sculptor featured in the New York part—to the expedition by the Russo-Prussian doctor, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, and his artsy stragglers, into the Amazon, in 1824. The varied group included the Swiss-French inventor,...

Women from Shakespeare’s oeuvre find themselves reincarnated in modern-day South America through the recent works of Argentine director Matías Piñeiro, which operate with non-linear structures concentrated on the intersection between the professional and intimate lives of actresses or aspiring artists.

His unassumingly sumptuous new feature Isabella–which channels the central sister-brother dilemma in the British author’s Measure for Measure–examines two women’s unexpressed self-doubt, their aversion to risk, and conflicted career aspirations in an initially puzzling but ultimately rewarding fragmented narrative.

From one shot to the next, Mariel (María Villar), a teacher and thespian who’s been down on her luck for some time, goes from being noticeably pregnant to showing no signs of said state—a clue denoting we are rapidly jumping across distinct timelines. Throughout the film, its circuitous assembly toys with the past and the present to reveal key pieces of information for us...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe first poster for Abel Ferrara's long-awaited Siberia, which will compete in the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. In 2015, Ferrara described the mysterious picture as a means of seeing "if we can really film dreams—our fears, our regrets, our nostalgia.”This year's Academy Awards concluded with a Best Picture win for Parasite! Check out the rest of the winners here. Recommended VIEWINGThe trailer for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, about the final issue published by a fictional American magazine based in a French city. Matías Piñeiro continues his Shakespeare series with Isabella. The film, which premieres at the upcoming Berlinale, features regular collaborators Maria Villar and Agustina Muñoz and circles the production of the play Measure by Measure. The first trailer for Sally Potter's The Roads Not Taken, which stars Javier Bardem...

The 70th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20 – March 1) unveiled its Encounters program today, featuring the premieres of new works by Tim Sutton and Romanian director Cristi Puiu.

Also screening is Josephine Decker’s Shirley with Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, marking the film’s international premiere after its upcoming Sundance bow, and Gunda by Victor Kossakovsky, whose last pic was the 2018 Venice doc Aquarela.

Encounters is a newly-created competitive section at the Berlin festival that looks to highlight “new voices in cinema and to give more room to diverse narrative and documentary forms.” A three-member jury will choose the winners for Best Film, Best Director and a Special Jury Award.

“As a result of passionate research, the 15 titles chosen for Encounters present the vitality of cinema in all of its forms. Each film presents a different way of interpreting the cinematic story: autobiographical, intimate, political,...

A few years ago we explored the filmography of one of our most under-appreciated directors, Matías Piñeiro, and now he’s back for what looks to be his most substantial release yet. Hermia & Helena, which I named the number one film to see this month, follows a young Argentine theater director who arrives to New York to work on a new Shakespeare production. Ahead of a release next week, Kino Lorber has now released the first trailer.

We said in our review, “For beginning with a dedication to Setsuko Hara, recently departed muse of Ozu and Naruse, Hermia & Helena — the new film by Viola and The Princess of France director Matías Piñeiro — perhaps aligns us to be especially attuned to the Argentinian auteur’s use of female collaborators. One to already emphasize the charisma and big-screen friendly faces of frequent stars Agustina Munoz and Maria Villar, he still seems to...

All the Cities of the NorthSundance has the clout, Cannes the razzle-dazzle. Toronto’s epic film selection is world class. But ask any serious cinephile which of the world’s grand festival institutions deserves your undivided attention, their answer more often than not would be Locarno. Since its inception in 1946, the annual Swiss film festival is a haven for innovative new works by veteran and freshman auteurs alike. The Golden Leopard, Locarno’s equivalent of the Palme D’or, has gone to a diverse group of winners that includes both Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones and Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then. Sensing an egregious lack of this progressive programing spirit in their Southern California megalopolis, film critics Jordan Cronk and Robert Koehler have masterminded a curatorial anecdote: Locarno in Los Angeles. Running April 21 through April 23, the event will showcase 10 features and a number of shorts that screened at...

Bill Curran reporting from the New York Film Festival. Hot takes on two titles...

Hermia and Helena

Matías Piñeiro’s newest Bard-based roundelay belongs to that venerable arthouse tradition, the stranger-here-in-this-town movie. Far from attempting a fully foreign pose, the Argentina-bred but Brooklyn-living Piñeiro is driven by the same impulse found in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon and Wim Wender’s 70’s USA road trilogy: flaunt the outsider perspective. When Carmen (Maria Villar) hustles back to Buenos Aires with an unfinished manuscript, Camila (Agustina Muñoz) all but assumes her friend’s spot—not to mention a few dangling relationships—in a literary translation fellowship in New York City. Camila’s choice of text: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, naturally, giving Hermia and Helena license to oscillate between North and South America as if they were different worlds, and to riff on the impermanency of love and self.

This was a busy year at Tiff, where I was a juror for Fipresci, helping to award a prize for best premiere in the Discovery section. Not only did this mean that some other films had to take a back burner—sadly, I did not see Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge—but my writing time was a bit compromised as well. Better late than never? That is for you, Gentle Reader, to decide.Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany)So basic in the telling—a record of several days’ worth of visitors mostly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany—Austerlitz is a film that in many ways exemplifies the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. What is the net effect for humanity when, faced with the drive to remember the unfathomable, we employ the grossly inadequate tools at our disposal?Austerlitz takes its name from W. G. Sebald’s final novel.

The 2016 New York Film Festival line-up has arrived, and as usual for the festival, it’s an amazing slate of films. Along with the previously announced The 13th, 20th Century Women, and The Lost City of Z, there’s two of our Sundance favorites, Manchester By the Sea and Certain Women, as well as the top films of Cannes: Elle, Paterson, Personal Shopper, Graduation, Julieta, I, Daniel Blake, Aquarius, Neruda, Sieranevada, Toni Erdmann, and Staying Vertical. As for other highlights, the latest films from Hong Sang-soo, Barry Jenkins, and Matías Piñeiro will also screen.

Check it out below, including our reviews where available.

The 13th (Opening Night, previously announced)

Directed by Ava DuVernay

USA, 2016

World Premiere

The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,...

Well over a year ago, Vadim Rizov visited the set of Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s latest, Hermia & Helena, now premiering in competition in Locarno. He noted that Piñeiro’s first three features have all "started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France." The key text this time around is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not only has Piñeiro set much of the film in New York for the first time, he's added a slew of newcomers to his cast of regulars: Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Pablo Sigal, Kyle Molzan, Ryan Miyake, Oscar Williams, Mati Diop, Julian Larquier, Keith Poulson, Dan Sallitt, Laura Paredes, Dustin Guy Defa, Gabi Saidón and Romina Paula. We're collecting reviews and interviews. » - David Hudson...

Well over a year ago, Vadim Rizov visited the set of Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s latest, Hermia & Helena, now premiering in competition in Locarno. He noted that Piñeiro’s first three features have all "started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France." The key text this time around is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not only has Piñeiro set much of the film in New York for the first time, he's added a slew of newcomers to his cast of regulars: Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Pablo Sigal, Kyle Molzan, Ryan Miyake, Oscar Williams, Mati Diop, Julian Larquier, Keith Poulson, Dan Sallitt, Laura Paredes, Dustin Guy Defa, Gabi Saidón and Romina Paula. We're collecting reviews and interviews. » - David Hudson...

Matías Piñeiro on the set of Hermia & HelenaAfter presenting his complete retrospective at Olhar de Cinema in Brazil this past June, I spoke to the Argentine filmmaker about his new film Hermia & Helena a few days before its world premiere as part of the International Competition at the 69th Locarno Film Festival.In Hermia & Helena, Camila, a young Argentine theater director, travels to New York to work on a translation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream. With her boyfriend and friends back in Buenos Aires, Camila rethinks old and new relationships. Shot between the two cities, the film is divided into chapters that focus on the different lives Camila experiences, as well as the different people she encounters during her journey.Notebook: Hermia & Helena shares a similar aesthetic with your previous films. At the same time, the overall tone feels much more melancholic now. You have been living...

Opening Night – World Premiere

Gone Girl

David Fincher, USA, 2014, Dcp, 150m

David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage,...

Without prefatory contextualization, Matías Piñeiro’s dreamily conceived Viola doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We’re dropped into the production of an all-female Argentinian take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where the character of Viola is tasked with finding the fancy of Olivia in the name of Duke Orsino, in doing ultimately blurring the lines of emotional truth between the trio. With the production title itself the only given, the implied narrative is something you’re expected to know going in and it’s ultimately the key to the elegantly compounded mystery written within. Strangely, you’ll likely be swept up in its perplexing hypno-theater whether you’re in on the narrative subtleties of Piñeiro’s film or not.

The production soon ends and we find ourselves in the dressing rooms, the cast of women peeling off their fake eyelashes and recounting their awkward eye-locking line deliveries from the night’s performance.

Check out the trailer and browse the images below for Cinema Guild's Viola. The drama opens July 12 in New York City and stars María Villar, Agustina Muñoz and Elisa Carricajo. Directed by Matías Piñeiro, one of Argentinian cinema’s most sensuous and daring new voices, Viola is a mystery of romantic entanglements and intrigues among a troupe of young actors performing Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in a small theater in Buenos Aires. Viola is produced by Melanie Schapiro.