Hermia & Helena

The young Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro (who visited the Wexner Center for a retrospective in April 2015) is known for his playful and adventurous modern-day stories based on Shakespeare’s heroines. His first film made in the US, Hermia & Helena follows a young Argentine theater director (the mesmerizing Piñeiro staple Agustina Muñoz) working in New York on a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Just as she’s beginning to regret leaving her friends and life in Argentina, she begins receiving a set of mysterious postcards from another participant in her artist’s residency program (played by Mati Diop from Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum). A series of dead ends, new beginnings, and amorous detours across hemispheres and languages follow, in which Shakespeare’s words clash with the complexities of modern, digital life. (87 mins., DCP)