This phantasmagoric experimental drama puts Ancient Greek poet Sappho in conversation with the nymph Britomartis.

Inspired by the work of Sappho, the latest film from Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro (Hermia & Helena, MIFF 2017; The Princess of France, MIFF 2014) is adapted from a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s 1947 Dialoghi con Leucò that imagines an encounter between Sappho and Britomartis. Both are destined to meet a watery demise and, while rapt in discussion, they reflect on life, love and the bittersweet nature of desire. Meanwhile, the frame is punctuated with images of buildings, books, streets, skies, hands and handwritten pages, sometimes blurring and recurring to almost morph into a palimpsest of the work itself.

Lyrical and hypnotic, with a profundity that is belied by its concise running time, You Burn Me is a dance of yearning and death that unfolds with the logic of a dream. Working with expressive 16mm film, Piñeiro and cinematographer Tomas Paula Marques conjure a distinctive world – interweaving visuals and verse, metaphor and myth, and colliding present-day scenes with the ancient text – to forge new ways of exploring image and sound that expand the idea of what cinema can be.

“A fascinating creation, a fragmented, essayistic work that is, formally and conceptually, about its own making … Playful and full of life.” – In Review