THEY ALL LIE
aka Todos Mienten
Dir. Matías Piñeiro, 2009
Argentina, 75 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, MARCH 13 – 8 PM (FILMMAKER IN PERSON!)
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 29 – 7:30 PM

To borrow the filmmaker’s own term: the delirium of Matías Piñeiro’s films is probably better experienced than read about, each title a whirligig construction equally distancing and mesmerizing. Todos Mienten, the Argentine prodigy’s second feature, was shot over the course of a few days in the former countryside home of Piñeiro’s aunt and uncle, where he spent summers as a child; in the film’s so-called narrative, a group of seven friends are convening to drink, smoke, play music, and exhume the ghost of Argentina’s seventh president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Riffing off of a book Sarmiento wrote of his travels around the world, Piñeiro’s listless 20-somethings engage in a kind of sociohistorical game of dress-up, interchanging roles (both within the film’s isolated milieu and outside of it) as if engaging in Feats of (Narrative) Strength.

While Todos Mienten makes a point of bewildering its audience (broken into dissonant chapters, arrayed without even an acknowledged chronology) the air swirls with romantic intrigue (and/or sexual tension) that goes beyond mere words – even if they originally belonged to a tongue as silver-tipped as Sarmiento’s. Piñeiro’s mastery of light and camera is unnerving, with cinematographer Fernando Lockett’s camera regularly creeping around the ramshackle house’s corners with the type of breathless, slo-mo anticipation that usually results in finding a dead body. Todos Mienten is brilliantly choreographed arthouse cinema, as rigorously obsessed with creating the present anew as it is, inevitably, laden with reminders of the past.

“Piñeiro is making movies that point to one of the original questions raised by cinema: How does the imposition of writing—of language or of a lens—alter the world? His carefully structured films—balanced like mobiles, as he says—describe with precision that slippage between words and reality.” – Clinton Krute, BOMB

Spectacle is proud to host Matías Piñeiro and screenwriter Paul Felten (FRANCOPHENIA OR: DON’T KILL ME, I KNOW WHERE THE BABY IS and the upcoming ZEROVILLE) for a discussion of TODOS MIENTEN, followed by a Q&A, on Friday March 13th.