Matías Piñeiro talks about the process of scaling down his methods of production, going for a more intimate, artisanal approach, and rejecting deadline-based work while continuing to explore the potentialities of cinematic adaptation, language, and grammar.

Just 25 years old at the time of his debut feature (El hombre robado, 2007), Matías Piñeiro has, for the last decade and a half, been one of the names at the forefront of the second wave of the New Argentine Cinema, but also of international arthouse cinema, at large. His body of work can be regarded as a continual, intricate, and increasingly complex, arborescent process of investigating the act of literary adaptation in cinema – crowned by a cycle of six films that has come to be known as the Shakespeareade, made with the same crew and close-knit community of Argentine actresses (amongst them, the legendary Piel de Lava trouppe, known for their performances in La Flor, 2018, and Trenque Lauquen, 2022). 

Initially nestling the script within a fictional supra-structure (often one about actresses) that closely resembled the adapted text – in Rosalinda (2010), Viola (2012), The Princess of France (2014) and Hermia and Helena (2016) –, Piñeiro sharply changed course in the final two films of the cycle. Isabella (2020) completely blows up the linearity of the plot. It dabbles in figurative experiments with light and color, while Sycorax (2021, co-directed with Lois Patiño) investigates, in little over twenty minutes, the myriad intricacies of the hybrid form in cinema. Now, with his latest feature film, he radically reworks his approach – proving himself as one of the most innovative thinkers about adaptation in contemporary cinema.

When I meet Matías Piñeiro, on the eve of a Berlinale that – in sheer contrast to the serenity of his film – will prove to be very tumultuous and tense, he’s carrying the festival goodie bags of his two lead actresses, Gabriela Saidón and María Villar (the latter one might safely call his muse). The world premiere of his newest film, Tú me abrasas (You Burn Me), is set to take place in a few days in the Encounters section of the Berlinale – and this is the very first interview that he’s doing about it. “It’s the first time that I’m talking about it, so I feel the need to talk about very concrete things,” he tells me.

As we were arranging our meeting over WhatsApp a few days prior, I wrote to him that I was quite nervous about being the first person to interview him about the film. “Don’t think that I’m not nervous as well. We can take care of each other’s vulnerabilities,” he replies; which perfectly encapsulates the warmth he emanates as a person and the radiant, sun-like energy of his newest work. 

Our meeting point is The Barn Coffee Shop on Alte Potsdamer Strasse, an informal meeting hub of Berlinale. During the hour and a half that we sit down at the terrace, several protests erupt around the area: a manifestation against far-right extremism organized by the festival, a flash mob in support of the Palestinian cause, and a protest of German cinema workers that were demonstrating for higher hourly wages. Later on, during the premiere of his film, Piñiero said a few words of support for the besieged population of Gaza, which he also published on his Instagram profile, and added his name to an open letter asking for a ceasefire and for the festival to take a stronger stance on the matter.

Although he’s not a militant director, Piñeiro’s methods of working can be regarded as political: not just in terms of his approach to queerness, but especially when it comes to the (increasingly) artisanal means of production, which contrasts starkly with the common practices within the industry. 

A more essayistic form: from Pavese to the pandemic

Almost as soon as we sit down, Matías starts discussing the process behind Tú me abrasas – which, by all metrics, is a departure from his previous style: first of all, because it’s the first of his films not based upon the works of Shakespeare since his 2010 medium-length, Rosalinda. Instead, his latest – with a runtime that is little over an hour long – acts as a sort of tripartite adaptation: first (and foremost), of Sea Foam, one of the chapters in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò”. Secondly, there are fragmentary works of Sappho, which were recommended to him by one of the supportingsecondary actresses in the film, Agustina Munoz (herself a regular in his works). Third, and finally, there is the diary the director kept during the film’s own making. It’s a film shot on rich 16mm film, bathed in warm colors and much sunlight, that speaks of desire and longing. Piñeiro says that he started reading Cesare Pavese after seeing Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955), which was based on Tra donne sole (1949), and Straub-Huillet’s Dalla nube alla resistenza (1978), which touched upon Dialogue with Leucò. Within this very demanding text, he discovered that he felt a connection, a closeness to the discussion between Sappho and Britomartis. “One was real, the other one was a nymph, a creation, a mythological figure. This mixture attracted me, along with what they were talking about – the idea of desire, death, will, accident, unrest.”

A cycle of recurrent shots tries to answer the question of what an adaptation of a poem could be. The discussions between Sappho the poet (Saidón) and Britomartis the nymph (Villar) reject the shot-countershot logic, instead focusing on various other types of images (including WhatsApp messages), or silent portraits of the actresses. The film is an invitation to replicate the fragmentary experience of reading in a cinematic context: the film has interruptions that work like footnotes, jumps back and forth through the material, climbing up and down a ladder of layers and narrators, yet still deeply infused by a sense of ritual and contemplation. It’s also the first time that Piñeiro has shot on film reel since the late 2000s, but, this time around, his camera of choice is a handheld Bolex – marking the first time that he co-signs the film’s cinematography and the first feature film that he works on without DOP Fernando Lockett.

“I needed the film to display itself in a way that it showed that I was not in complete control of it.”

He credits this pivot to a style that is much more essayistic to a video correspondence that he did with fellow Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás during the lockdown. “It affected me,” he says. “We did some videos, each in their own home, during the times of the pandemic, imagine. But that allowed me to explore this essayistic aspect. It was very immediate. I was living in New York, unable to go back to Buenos Aires to shoot like I did with my other movies, and I did it with my phone, this phone,” he says, picking it up from the table. “These little letters really introduced me to a new way, a new possibility of how films can be”, he tells me, and that the distance was what prompted him to work outside of his typical structure. “And after shooting Shakespeare for 12 years or so, 10 years, I was kind of ready for a new way of thinking.”

Rituals: a scroll, a Bolex, and a cycle

Riffing off a beautiful text that he penned in 2021 about the late Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, which I discovered shortly after the British master’s passing, I asked him about the ritualistic aspects of the film. “In the text, you talk about rituals, and how there’s this beautiful contrast at hand because a ritual is both something that involves movement and something that is somehow static. Tú me abrasas also has a lot of rituals, in all of its layers, regarding all of its narrators, and within the very topic of writing, of creating.”

The very first ritual, he says, was the way that the film was made, “in the fact of getting together around this camera, around the Bolex.” He doesn’t consider himself a “technical” person, but with the help of friend and cinematographer Tomás Paula Marques [the director of the multi-award-winning short Dildotectonics], he learned how to use a film camera for the first time. “There’s something ritualistic about that,” he says. “There are paths, there are steps that give a sense of repetition, of doing again, which is like a ritual. And shooting is also like stopping the world a little bit. And there was also a lot of that energy in the edit. Because the technology really limits, and the limitations helped me nurture the mise-en-scene.” (He reckons that he shot six to seven times more footage than what appears in the film.)

As he describes it, the editing process of Tú me abrasas seems, indeed, very ritualistic – intricate, tactile, material – and is unlike anything that I’ve ever heard of: “I was printing every shot, making little papers and was putting them together in a very long scroll, organizing them in relation to the text.” This scroll (which “looks like a Torah”) is like a screenplay of sorts and contains all the stills and the lines of dialogue in the film – it was spread all over the floor of his apartment, and at one point he had to move the furniture to be able to take a proper look at it. “It really required me to stop time, a bit, and to have a particular way to organize space, along with a sort of theatricality in the moment of working, which has to do with staying for a longer time in a given position, in seeing, in waiting for the light.”

It was not just the edit of the film that was markedly different due to his usage of a Bolex – but also the way that he worked with his actresses. In contrast to other directors, who prepare for shooting on film reel by rehearsing with their performers a lot more than they would for a digital shoot, Piñeiro went for a radically opposite approach: not just by rehearsing less, but by also allowing himself to try out more camera positions than he regularly would’ve, “to try another thing for the same text”. “It was better to just change, and repeat. I don’t know, there was something about being very very present there while shooting, that created this sort of… world with its own rules. The rules of this camera. I had to be less in control, in a way.”

“I’m not a big strategist. And that has to do with this… way of allowing the film to be, a way that keeps on finding questions.”

This process was a very concrete solution to the fact that, initially, the filmmaker was not very sure how to approach the text – which he regarded as exciting, and a way to try things out without knowing exactly what it would be, or where it would lead to. “The technology created a way, a behavior of work, which affected the way that I was making the film, the mise-en-scène,” he says. “And that’s where that ritualistic aspect appears, in my opinion, in a very concrete way – which made me think about what I wanted to do, to write a little bit about what I wanted to do, shoot it, then develop it, watch it, go through this process of taking the pictures of the movie, and arranging them on the ground, in the scroll.” 

It was a cycle of “writing, shooting, and editing, writing, shooting, and editing, writing, shooting, and editing, constantly”, that was spread over a couple of years, instead of a couple of days that it usually took to shoot a film. And throughout this period, Piñeiro turned the fact of working with unknown elements into a process, and the process into the film itself. He refers to the shots in the film where he is writing down ideas in a notebook, one of which concerns the fact that he couldn’t yet picture how the edit of the film was going to look like, or how to shoot it – a scene that is “true”, he says – because he was aware that he couldn’t film this text in the same way that he shot the Shakespeareade. “This text cannot be shot this way and I don’t know how to shoot it so I have to start shooting it – no?”

The final layer of the ritualistic aspect was “immersing yourself in all these shots that you’ve done and trying to organize them” – which was impossible to do on a computer. “I needed these very concrete, very real elements that I could touch, cut, paste, re-paste, re-arrange, write down. And there was something about that that really made me focus. And that’s what I find interesting about rituals, they get you focused: so that you don’t forget to change the diaphragm of the camera, the speed – it’s something that you need to pay attention to.” 

Ultimately, it’s all about attention: “I connect the notion of ritual with the idea of paying more attention, in a world in which it’s very easy to get distracted.” He sums it up by saying that if the idea of ritual appears in the film, it’s because it was quite concretely part of its making. “It’s a conceptual text, allegorical… It’s about the dialectics of dialogue. And so, the text needed a different technology, a different mise-en-scène than the other films.” 

A more intimate scale and having time

This tangible and material way of working on the film is embedded within the film itself – it’s noticeably a film that was shot over a longer course of time than most, and it’s much more artisanal, requiring a much larger degree of direct involvement. I ask him how he experienced this shift in his mode of production, and how it compares to his previous way of working on a film. “I always worked in a very small way, even before, but I had more people, more collaborators: Fernando [the DOP], Ana [the production designer], an assistant director, and so on,” he says. “For this film, I decided that I needed to be crafting it on my own, because it needed to… fail, in a way. I needed to be able to experiment without knowing where I was going, and so, involving more people in that would be a bit complicated.”

The main difference, he says, was the intimacy that this method of working created between him and the actresses, and the material itself. However, he underlines that these ways of working are not radically opposite to one another: “I was not making 20-million-dollar movies before, so it’s not radical. But yeah, it became smaller – I felt that it needed that intimacy, that immediacy.” When he was shooting his films with Fernando Locket, things were more planned out, he says. “It was more collaborative – but when I was shooting the film on my own, or with Tomás Paula, we were mostly just three or four people, using a camera that only shoots 25 seconds at a time. Usually, the standard [length of shots] of my other films was around a minute and a half, and now it was six, seven times less.”

“The other movies have this curl, that there’s an actress that is playing Shakespeare. Here, I didn’t feel that I needed that. I could be more direct. There’s no need for the play, the reflection, the echo.”

To him, this smaller way of working meant reacting to things much faster and working more quickly; and a larger crew sometimes delays things. “All of a sudden, I was able to react. The closeness of working in two created this possibility of reacting more quickly – not just in terms of light and composition and so on, but also in regard to creating intimacy. Trying some ideas, and having the possibility of trying something that could turn out to be bad.” And sometimes it was bad, he claims – and sometimes they didn’t know what was going to come out of it. “Finding these things that work without fully knowing if they were going to work was possible only because of this structure. Which also allows you to find something that was not there before.”

“It required having time, you know? That’s a big privilege, to have time.” He’s paraphrasing Straub-Huillet – and how they talk about having time to work on a film in Pedro Costa’s 2001 documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?. “People usually don’t have time nowadays. They can have money, but not time. And I felt that, instead of embracing the need for more money, more resources, more people, I could just choose a path where I could have more time.” Rejecting deadlines meant that he could allow himself to have more time to “think about the movie that I wanted to make”, “the movie that I felt good with”, that is, to work on it until he felt that a certain sense of equilibrium had been achieved. “There was a desire to treat time differently. And the text is expanded by including these other layers of time. I needed to have different approaches. Something a little more porous,” he concludes. 

Time is of the essence: spanning from the present age to the times of Sappho, more than two and a half millennia ago, and going through Pavese’s maturity during the tumultuous forties. I ask how he relates to the way that all these layers, spanning across eons, come together to underline the universality of human experience. “The time of the movie is peculiar; it’s suspended. It’s not like it’s Cleo from 5 to 8 [by Agnes Varda], where you know exactly how long things take, or what the duration of the plot is, like a weekend or a couple of weeks,” he replies.

Genre trouble and the gaps in adaptation

The film’s layered construction is very much indebted to the way that it approaches literature – and how one consumes it. “I think that this is a movie about reading. On reading. It’s an invitation to read. I wanted people to read on the screen, to have a moment to read the poem of Sappho – I’m not going to refer to them, I’m not going to adapt them, I’m just going to put them on screen so that they can be read. So there’s always this idea of having pleasure in the reading of a text, that I wanted to communicate and share.”

He gives the example of how Tú me abrasas approaches footnotes, about mythological figures such as Helen of Troy or the nymph Calypso – which he was very curious to explore in terms of a cinematic approach. “I understood how to adapt a text, but not how to bring the idea of a footnote to cinema. It’s a layer that is separate from the text,” he muses. “Because when you read, the footnote interrupts the flow of reading and you go into a different sort of time, a different level of speech. And so these different layers of speech were creating these changes within time.”

After all, he sees the characters as inhabiting a similarly suspended time – prompting a different approach. “[Sappho and Britomartis are] dead – yet, they’re not ghosts, so what are they? There is this sort of suspension of time, which is another sort of appreciation of time. As the text is a bit more conceptual, the film is also a bit more hybrid because of the essayistic element that is incorporated within this fusion of genres, the dramatic and the essayistic.” 

“I also propose that things are not only one way. The views on Calypso can be multiple. The ways of Sappho are multiple. Maybe Sappho didn’t kill herself. The idea of expanding knowledge is to understand that there’s more than one possibility of understanding things.”

And the poetic, I add – underlining the sequences which bookend Tú me abrasas, where individual words in Sappho’s fragmented poems are turned into individual frames (sometimes, the objects are fully unrelated: such as a kitchen sink), and which allowed him to speculate about her yet undiscovered works. “I think that the key was never to try to fully conceive the poem, that I’m going to fully communicate the poetry because it’s a very subjective experience,” Matías says. “I think that maybe the strongest adaptation is when you just allow the audience to read the poem from the page. Maybe it’s that. I don’t need to put any sort of decoration to fully communicate the poem, because that’s already an interpretation. And that will impact upon the meaning of the poem, especially in a poem that is all fragments.”

I tell him that, to me, the film really brings into question a different sort of relationship between cinema and text, especially considering that many have a pretty normative relationship with the notion of adaptation. “It’s an adaptation with quotation marks. It’s a riff on the idea of adaptation, the idea of rendering the full text into another language, like jumping the gap between languages or between discourses, such as the written discourse and the audiovisual discourse. There’s always going to be a gap.”

To him, the beautiful thing about adaptation lies precisely in the inability to transport everything from one object to another, in variation. “I pay attention to that gap, to that void between the two different disciplines, literature, and cinema, theatre and cinema, poetry and cinema. There’s always a gap that I try to become conscious of by proposing different approaches to what to do with one poem. When you put them together, the clash is what creates the thrill. It’s like basic editing theory, creating a third image. And that I hope that invites the audience to create their own narrative, in that sense.”

Walking as a form of editing

We’re nearing the end of the interview – and the surrounding noise of the protests on opening night is getting louder and louder. I finish by observing that, the way he describes them, reading and editing are very similar processes: going back and forth, revisiting, and finding different meanings upon returning. Piñeiro uses a lovely analogy to sum it up: “It’s like walking randomly. You’re not lost, you’re just walking around – you don’t have a clear objective. Still, you make choices at each corner, and you have reasons why: because the sun is setting over there, or someone crossed your path.” 

“And why do you do that? Because you have time. And also because you want to see if you can discover something new about yourself on that path. Or, maybe, that path makes you meet someone you’ve never met before. Something new.” Matías stops for a bit, then adds, “A desire to expose yourself to something a little bit different.”

Main photo, on courtesy of the Berlinale.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.