You Burn Me
Tú me abrasas
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
Tickets
For information about the accessible services being offered at MIFF, please visit miff.com.au/access. If you require any access service, such as wheelchair/step-free access, for any MIFF session, please call 03 8660 4888 or email boxoffice@miff.com.au to book your ticket.
You might also like ...
If you think you’ve seen enough crime dramas that you can predict every twist, think again. This trippy investigation will keep you second-guessing.
Showcased in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Beau Is Afraid’s breakout animators turn Chile’s Neo-Nazi history into a nightmarish stop-motion meta-movie.
The strange, tragic tale of the ‘cocaine hippo’ once owned by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar – narrated by the ghost of the beast himself.