Isabella, the latest addition to Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s series on Shakespeare’s female characters, opens on Friday, August 27 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, followed by Los Angeles on Friday, September 3 at the Laemmle Royal, before continuing on to other U.S. and Canadian cities.
Following Hermia & Helena (2016), The Princess of France (2014), Viola (2012), and Rosalinda (2011), Isabella is to be the antepenultimate entry in the filmmakers decade-long “Shakespeareads” chronicle ahead of the short film Sycorax, which recently premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, and the forthcoming Ariel, both co-directed with Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño and based on The Tempest.
Developing the themes brought up in his previous films, Isabella playfully draws the series into a new stage of life alongside the maturation of the actresses who have starred in all previous installments of Piñeiro’s “Shakespeareads.”
Mariel (María Villar) longs to play the role of Isabella in a local theater troupe’s production of the Bard’s Measure for Measure, but money problems prevent her from preparing for the audition. She thinks of asking her brother for financial help, but is worried about being too direct. Her solution is to ask her brother’s girlfriend, Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), also an actress and a more self-assured one, to convince her brother to give her the money. Luciana agrees on the condition that Mariel will not abandon her acting and continue to prepare for the part of Isabella.
Winner of the Special Jury Mention in the Encounters section at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, winner of both the Best Director and Best Performance awards at the 2020 Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Isabella stars María Villar (Mariel), Agustina Muñoz (Luciana), Pablo Sigal (Miguel), Gabi Saidón (Sol), Ana Cambre (Ana), Guillermo Solovey (Marcos), Tom Cambre Solovey (Tom), Alberto Suárez (Angelo), and Dario Oliveira (Director).
Watch the trailer for Isabella
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina 1982, writer and director Matías Piñeiro lives in New York. For the last ten years he has been developing a series of films based on the female roles in William Shakespeare’s comedies called “The Shakespeareads”. He teaches filmmaking at Pratt Institute (New York), Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, France) and Elías Querejeta Zine Escola (San Sebastian, Spain). He programs for Punto de Vista Film Festival (Pamplona, Spain) and Anthology Film Archives (NY, USA). At present, he is working in two film projects, the closure to his Shakespearean project: Sycorax and Ariel, both co-directed with Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño and based on The Tempest.