Thursday, May 18, 2017

Piñeiro's Hermia & Helena

Hermia & Helena. Dir. Matías Piñeiro. Perf. Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Mati Diop.  Trapecio Cine, Ravenser Odd, and Cinema Conservancy. 26 May 2017 [US Theatrical Release]. 

I've heard a bit about this film from time to time, and it's about to have a US release. During the past few weeks, I've been paying more attention to Shakespeare in Spanish, so a film about a woman who is translating Midsummer Night's Dream is intriguing.

But that's not all that's intriguing!  From the plot and the trailer, it looks like quite a promising film.  The Film Stage has an entry on the film here. They offer this plot summary:
Camila (Agustina Muñoz, The Princess of France), a young Argentine theater director, travels from Buenos Aires to New York for an artist residency to work on a new Spanish translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Upon her arrival, she quickly realizes that her work isn’t compensating for the loss of her friends and the lover she left behind. When she begins to receive a series of mysterious postcards from Danièle (Mati Diop, Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum), a former participant in the same residency, Camila second-guesses her artistic endeavors and begins to seek answers about her past. Hermia & Helena mingles actors from Matías Piñeiro’s Buenos Aires repertory with stalwarts of New York’s independent film scene (Keith Poulson, Dustin Guy Defa, Dan Sallitt). It is a film of dead ends and new beginnings, navigating amorous detours across hemispheres and languages, in which the words of Shakespeare clash with the entanglements of modern, digital life.
And here's the official trailer:


Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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