10/02/2025 - The Galician director reflects on his fourth feature, a meta-cinematic exploration of Shakespeare’s theatre threading together many of his previous preoccupations

(© Camilo Oviedo)

Ariel [+see also:
film review
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile], the new film by Samsara [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile] director Lois Patiño, has been presented at this year’s IFFR, in the Harbour section. Ariel takes its title character, and much more besides, from William Shakespeare’s island-set play The Tempest. The film is a departure from the director’s earlier works, but it threads together many of his previous preoccupations. We spoke with Patiño about collaboration, interpolation, and the interplay between fiction and reality.

Cineuropa: You originally conceived this film with Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro. You’d made a short together, Sycorax. How did this project evolve from those beginnings?
Lois Patiño: Our main idea was this feature. We made Sycorax to practise constructing cinema language together, as we were coming from two different, almost opposite, styles. But with the pandemic and other deadlines that we had, Matias couldn't participate [in Ariel].

We had sought a place where our interests would converge, and we found that in The Tempest. It’s the Shakespeare play where nature is most present – there’s that spirituality of the natural elements. So, there was the theatre, and my interest in landscape, contemplation and spirituality. The main idea was to make a free adaptation of The Tempest from the perspective of Ariel. It grew from there.

From there, the film branches off to explore further Shakespeare plays. What led you to expand the project’s focus?
We had the idea of making a meta-narrative, a double relationship representing reality and fiction. But I wanted to expand that further, to this idea that we are on the islands of different Shakespeare characters, and also to other playwrights, like Pirandello. A big idea that I brought in was the existential problems of the characters knowing that they are characters.

I wanted to recontextualise Shakespeare. The authorities in this film only speak in Shakespeare’s words. Sometimes someone asks something, and the answer is complete nonsense. I brought in humour from absurd theatre, and I mixed Shakespeare with other theatrical ideas. There’s a Beckett character on one of the islands.

This deconstructive impulse is interesting, as you’ve brought an Argentinian actress, Agustina Muñoz, into the centre of the film. The metatextual deconstruction in contemporary Argentinian cinema is increasingly visible internationally.
I hadn’t thought about that, but it's true. I was influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by Matías. I love Mariano Llinás’s work. The text here is fragmented, and we come to understand that there are many plays taking place in parallel. I thought about Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pedro Pinho
film profile]. He also works with non-professional actors. It was my hope, for example, that three old women in a supermarket doing Othello could work. And if they don’t do it nicely, the concept of the film is accepting of that.

What led you to shoot on the Azores?
We needed the presence of the wind, as we needed the vegetation to move. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the climate changes almost every hour, so there are a lot of storms and clouds, and then sunshine. It made the shoot difficult, but it gave us this powerful form of nature. I was also interested in bringing Shakespeare’s language to Portuguese, a minority language: to take it from the dominant language to something else.

The film feels dreamlike, and your previous work demands an active engagement from the spectator. The midpoint in Samsara is one such example, with flashing lights to prompt the viewer to close their eyes. What experience are you hoping to create with this film?
I thought a lot about this idea of experience; it's one of the things that interests me most. Coast of Death [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile] is an experience involving space and time. Everything is shot at a distance, but we hear the sound very closely. In Red Moon Tide [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile], I explored the idea of time. Everybody is paralysed for the whole film. Ariel doesn’t go that deep in working with the elements of cinema. But my desire was to work in this double experience of reality and fiction, and explore the way they mix. It's not, for me, as radical or essential as working with the matter of time and space, or light and sound, but I think it's a conceptually interesting idea to explore and experience.