Imagine you are a novice nun in the 17th century and your brother is condemned to death for fornication (which used to be a sin, you see). Apparently, he made an unmarried woman pregnant, which is unforgivable. As a virtuous nun, you struggle between praying for your beloved brother's salvation and letting justice carry out his sentence, for you agree that he has sinned and is worth it. In the end...
Such is the dilemma posed by William Shakespeare's play Measure by Measure, which for years was considered comedy and then drama and now no one knows very well. And it is such a role, that of the double-barrelled sister, that the protagonist of Isabella, the fourth film by the Argentine Matías Piñeiro based on the female characters of the English genius, rehearses time and again. He previously shot - and won awards and applause - with Viola, Rosalinda and The Princess of France. Now he comes to Xixón with the story of another girl, that are many.
Isabella is a demanding film. It needs you as a spectator to get rid of the concept of linear time, and also of the adjacent spaces, as it works as a kind of apparently unconnected scenes, which jump forward and backward. A continuous rehearsal for an audition through which the life of the protagonist advances and expands. You are now in the present but at the same time in the past without almost any change of plane. The form is as important as the background, the setting as relevant as the reality. Shakespeare is as everyday as a pregnancy. Theatre is life and it is cinema and it is a perspective. Those boxes of decreasing size, with lights, that run through the whole film. Or the waves left by the stones thrown into the water in the initial scene. Circles, lines and colours.
Isabella is competing in this 58th edition of FICX, within the Albar section, dedicated to the authors who have accompanied the Festival as their career has progressed. Here you have all the technical data, and the film's file.
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