Following Hermia & Helena and Isabella, Matías Piñeiro’s new film You Burn Me playfully, gorgeously adapts “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Centered around fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by Gabi Saidón and María Villar, respectively), Piñeiro’s latest is a feat of effervescent poetic beauty, melding poignant words with stunning images to a dizzying, transcendent effect. With the Berlinale and NYFF selection picked up by Cinema Guild for a release beginning next week, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer.
You Burn Me will open on Friday, March 7 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, accompanied by a special series curated by Matías himself, including works by Michelangelo Antonioni, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Mariano Llinas, and more. For those in Los Angeles, don’t miss the LA premiere on March 15 at American Cinematheque as part of a series featuring films by the director. The film’s North American theatrical release includes the brand-new, standalone six-minute short Preface for the Little Dialogue, featuring the director’s voiceover as an introduction to the feature.
Here’s the synopsis: “An adaptation of ‘Sea Foam,’ a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò, Piñeiro’s latest is an intimate and expansive meditation on death and desire and a thrilling exploration of the possibilities of adapting text to film. In ‘Sea Foam,’ Pavese stages a fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by frequent Piñeiro collaborators Gabi Saidón and María Villar). Sappho has thrown herself into the ocean from heartbreak. Britomartis has fallen off a cliff into the water while fleeing a man. Reuniting at the shore, they discuss life, death and the bittersweet nature of desire. But Piñeiro, known for his series of metatextual films dealing with the translation and performance of Shakespeare, is not content to simply restage a dialogue and instead infuses the film with footnotes and lacunae: the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, by whom only one complete poem still exists; the circumstances of Pavese’s death, heartbroken in a Turin hotel room; and the science of sea foam with its connections to disease and fertility. In this ebb and flow of death and desire, You Burn Me introduces a game of translation and memorization, a game intrinsic to the moving image that may just save Sappho, Pavese, Piñeiro and the audience from oblivion.”
See the exclusive trailer below.
