DOUBLE FEATURE: two beguiling films about performance and the realities it engenders.

Among the many schisms dividing the cinema world, the split between documentary and fiction seems to be the harshest. Yet, as long as a film features a human subject, it will always rely on the performance of the subject to engender the reality depicted. The veracity/truthfulness of a performance may be questioned, but rarely do we doubt its effects. Here, we present two films that explicitly problematize the effectiveness of performance and attempt to ask whether or not it matters?

Nicolás Pereda’s Greatest Hits begins as a fiction film about a mother-and-son duo whose routine is shattered when the son’s father intrudes into their lives after a long absence. This reality is soon displaced when a different actor is brought in, midway through the film, to portray the father figure, creating a mise-en-abyme of recreated memories. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Matías Piñeiro’s Viola, which begins with an already-fractured reality. As an all-women theater troupe rehearses Love’s Labour’s Lost, the performance of the play starts to gain a reality of its own and identities are gradually replaced/displaced within/without the play. (Daniel Hui)

“Nicolás Pereda has distinguished himself as one of Mexico’s most treasured young writer-directors.” (Film Society of Lincoln Center)

“A rising star of contemporary Mexican cinema” (Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive)

Greatest Hits, Nicolás Pereda, Mexico, 2012, HD, 103 minutes

Festivals:

• Festival del Film Locarno (international competition)
• Festival International du Film La Roche-Sur-Yon 2012 (awarded Grand Prize of Ciné+ Jury)
• TIFF Cinematheque. Toronto – Retrospective “Where Are the Films of Nicolas Pereda?”

“[Piñeiro’s] most outstanding film to date” (Quintín, Cinema Scope)

“Wonderfully inventive … A triumph of narrative imagination and bottom-line ingenuity” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times).

Viola, Matías Piñeiro, Argentina, 2012, HD, 65 minutes

Festivals:

• Toronto International Film Festival
• Berlin International Film Festival
• Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) (awarded FIPRESCI Prize)
• New Directors/New Films, Film Society of Lincoln Center

PARTICIPANTS

Nicolás Pereda was born in 1982. He has directed 12 films that have been exhibited in festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam and Toronto. His work has also been exhibited in museums like MoMA, Guggenheim and Reina Sofia. He was given his first retrospective by Cine las Americas in Austin, Texas in 2010, following others held in Jeonju, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, Madrid, Berkeley, Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco. He is currently the director of the Rutgers Filmmaking Center.

Matías Piñeiro born in Buenos Aires in 1982, studied at la Universidad del Cine. Piñeiro started as an assistant director in various short films and feature films. In 2006 he was one of eleven directors in the collective feature, Regarding Buenos Aires, and in 2007 he screened his first feature, The Stolen Man, winning the Best New Director Award in Las Palmas Film Festival and the Best Film in Jeonju International Film Festival. In 2009, he finished his second They All Lie and in 2010 he has joined the 11º Jeonju Digital Project with his film Rosalinda. He has since made two other feature films, Viola and The Princess of France, released to great acclaim around the world.

Daniel Hui is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film program in California Institute of the Arts, his films have been screened at film festivals in Rotterdam, Hawaii, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, and Vladivostok. His writings have been published in prominent cinema journals, including the Cinematheque Quarterly of the National Museum Singapore. He is the contributing editor to the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) online journal, Cinemas of Asia.  He is also one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures, an independent film collective whose films have garnered critical acclaim all around the world. He recently won the Special Jury Award at the TFFDoc section of the Torino Film Festival for his second feature film Snakeskin.