In Todos Mienten and Rosalinda, Piñeiro leaves behind the metropolitan setting of his debut to craft two intriguing ensemble pieces that explore artifice, identity, and the nature of performance.

A group of friends and artists gather at a summer house deep in the countryside, but quickly find themselves engaged in an elaborate game of manipulation and deceit, the rules of which no-one seems sure. Drawing inspiration from the towering figure of Domingo Sarmiento, Matías Piñeiro’s second feature is an intricate chamber play filled with forged paintings, planned robberies, and romantic intrigue.

Both a conscious formal departure and an intriguing evolution, Todos Mienten dispenses with the black and white imagery and metropolitan setting of its predecessor but retains its postmodern flourishes and literary roots. Composed in a seductive roundelay of immaculately choreographed long takes by Piñeiro and his long-time cinematographer Fernando Lockett, Todos Mienten is an intoxicating cocktail that endlessly blurs the lines between performance and reality, truth and fiction.

Commissioned as a part of Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital Projects Initiative, Piñeiro’s mid-length film Rosalinda marked both his transition from film to digital and the beginning of Las Shakesperiadas – a cycle of films exploring the female characters in Shakespeare’s Comedies.

Set in the El Tigre delta, north of Buenos Aires, Rosalinda centres on a group of young actors rehearsing Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Amid a series of playfully romantic interludes Luisa, who plays the eponymous Rosalinda, finds her personality slowly beginning to meld indistinguishably with the character she’s playing. Invoking Jacques Rivette’s principle of la vie parallèle, the film is a sprightly exploration of artifice and identity.