Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro received a Special Jury Mention at the Berlinale’s Encounter competition for his latest film Isabella, which marks the fifth installment in Piñeiro’s Shakespeare series, narrating contemporary fictions about the women roles in the comedies of William Shakespeare.
Starring Piñeiro regulars Maria Villar and Agustina Muñoz, the film follows Mariel, an actress from Buenos Aires who tries to win, over the course of two years of auditions, the role of Isabella, the heroine of the comedy Measure for Measure. On a road bordered by frustration and the idea of success, Mariel finds Luciana again and again, an old theater companion who acts as a kind of brilliant shadow, a destiny she cannot avoid, that illuminates and bewitches her at the same time. Isabella unfolds like a jigsaw puzzle of the difficulty of precisely defining the color of our desires.
According to the Berlinale’s description, the film “is a moral story that, following in the footsteps of Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette, [that] experiments with non-linear narrative. Piñeiro constructs a colorful mosaic of mathematical precision that traces Mariel's story both forwards and backwards in time.”
