You Burn Me by Matías Piñeiro
Film at Lincoln Center has announced the lineup for this year’s New York Film Festival’s Currents section, dedicated to new and innovative forms and voices. The lineup includes Lázaro at Night / Lázaro de noche by Mexican director Nicolás Pereda and You Burn Me / Tú me abrasas by Argentine director Matías Piñeiro. Currents will also host the North American premiere of The Suit by German director Heinz Emigholz, a Mexican and Argentine co-production shot in Berlin, Malta, and Mexico City.
Pereda, whose films elegantly balance wry, naturalistic interpersonal comedy and surreal transcendence, returns with a marvelous inquiry into art-making, storytelling, and the fragile bonds of friendship that takes his blend of the theatrical and the mundane to a new level. Lázaro at Night, presented in its US premiere, centers on a trio of friends, connected by a writing workshop they attended years earlier. Today, as they navigate romance and infidelity, their bond is further complicated by the fact that they are all auditioning to be in the same low-budget movie. Connected by a complex sound design that occasionally collapses time and space, scenes of absurd mundanity give way to the fantasy of fiction, its triangle of poets, artists, and actors motivated equally by wishful dreaming and comic, everyday neuroses.
In his consistently generative films, Argentine filmmaker Piñeiro (The Princess of France, Isabella) finds compelling cinematic ways to express the eternal hold that classical texts have on the modern world. In his inventive You Burn Me, presented in its North American premiere, the tragic romantic relationship between ancient Greek poet Sappho and the siren goddess Britomartis, as described in “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Italian novelist Cesare Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò, becomes the starting point for an elegantly constructed exercise of research, performance, and interpretation by a group of contemporary women. Given to repetition and abstraction, Piñeiro’s film brings desire and myth to vivid life, reflecting the fragmented nature of what remains of Sappho’s poetry.
Additionally, four South American films will screen in the Currents short program: Like an Outburst by Sebastián Schjaer and Vibrant Matter by Pablo Marín, from Argentina; and Towards the Sun, Far from the Center by Pascal Viveros and Luciana Merino, and.October Noon by Francisco Rodríguez Tear from Chile.
In Schjaer’s Like an Outburst, having its world premiere at the festival, animals, humans, and machines seek a tenuous coexistence and different ways of seeing and living in the world. Microorganisms float against a desert landscape, the lights from cellphone towers blink like fireflies, and a mysterious dialogue between two minds adjusting to a new beginning.
A city, at once ancient and modern, emerges from among the brush. As wind works at the leaves, the grass, the microphone, the image is subject to its viewer’s hand, which sets snarls of traffic askew, flips a building like a coin, shakes the trees until they splinter. In Vibrant Matter Marín sketches a suspension of the laws of physics, his compositions offer an idiosyncratic view of a metropolis in flux.
In Towards the Sun, Far from the Center, the lens traces the pattern-made world as an omniscient eye falls upon its subjects, following their journey as small dramas emerge. Interest snags on two such figures who move differently than the rest through one airless afternoon in Santiago, solving the maze of urban entanglement as only lovers can.
“Everything is on fire.” In October Noon, four friends overlook the city of Santiago atop the San Cristobal Hill, and reflect on the events of the 2019 popular uprisings in Chile and the police violence that followed. Together, they inflate balloons, graffiti a friend’s torso, and discuss cinema, sustaining the reverberations of revolution as a collective memory, an echo in the street.
The 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival will take place September Octiber at
