Pin de fartie

Samuel Beckett once remarked, “I am searching for the voice of my silence.” How might one film a search of this kind? Alejo Moguillansky does not betray Beckett’s text of the same name, but rather transposes it and makes it his own. The two central figures of the play first surface in a Swiss canton, now a blind man and an adolescent girl. An actress and an actor meet like clandestine lovers to rehearse Endgame, getting together once a week just a few streets away from the National Congress in Buenos Aires. In the same city, the son of a renowned pianist pays his nonagenarian mother a daily visit; when they read Beckett together, they feel liberated. These fragmented episodes are loosely connected by brief musical interludes in which a woman offers a few words on the progression of each story. Moguillansky’s respect for the play is never in doubt: he doesn’t idolise it, but rather engages with it freely—and for that very reason discovers pure emotion in a text that forever grapples with nothingness drawing near. A happy paradox: Beckett refracted through a Rioplatense sensibility. From the apparent void, something vital and unexpected repeatedly emerges—perhaps a musical number in a single take, or a glorious tracking shot. (Roger Koza)

Alejo Moguillansky (selection): LA PRISIONERA (2006, KO-REGIE), CASTRO (2009), EL LORO Y EL CISNE (2013), EL ESCARABAJO DE ORO (2014, KO-REGIE), LA VENDEDORA DE FÓSFOROS (2017), POR EL DINERO (2019), LA EDAD MEDIA (2022, CO-DIRECTOR)