You Burn Me

a film by Matías Piñeiro
2024, 64 minutes

Poster

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.

Reviews

"With his latest feature film, [Piñeiro] proves himself one of the most innovative thinkers about adaptation in contemporary cinema."
-Flavia Dima, Films in Frame

"A fascinating creation... playful and full of life."
-Daniel Gorman, In Review Online

"A remarkable piece of experimental filmmaking that seeks answers to some philosophical and existential questions we have been asking ourselves for thousands of years."
-Matthew Joseph Jenner, International Cinephile Society

"Like Sappho’s fragments, You Burn Me can conjure up a whole universe by inhabiting the lack instead of trying to fill it up."
-Savina Petkova, CineEuropa