Matías Piñeiro (b. 1982) is a key member of the latest wave of talented directors enlivening the perennially youthful Argentine cinema. Sharing a similar predilection for formally innovative and often daringly experimental filmmaking as such otherwise diverse Argentine directors Lisandro Alonso (b. 1975), Mariano Llinás (b. 1975) and Alejo Moguillansky (b. 1978), Piñeiro has written and directed two critically acclaimed and interlocked fiction films that together offer an ambitious yet artfully playful meditation on narrative, performance and history. Piñeiro’s intricately structured and skillfully topographical narratives reveal plots within plots, unfolding entrancing mirror games that render characters and plot as smooth surfaces over which meanings glide and ricochet, resisting easy interpretation. A driving force of The Stolen Man and They All Lie is Piñeiro’s fascination with modern Argentine history and the figure of the nineteenth century intellectual and educational reformer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) whose influential writings are obsessively read and recited, in fragmentary fashion, throughout both films. Rather than inert artifacts, however, Sarmiento’s journals and essays are reinvented in Piñeiro’s films as shimmering “hypertexts,” baroque would-be screenplays that inspire his impulsive characters towards elaborate schemes. Simultaneous to his spirited engagement with the historical past is Piñeiro’s affectionate embrace of the present embodied by his ebullient and puckish young heroines whose willful yet ultimately wayward desires lead them through the dizzying labyrinths of their own imagination. – Haden Guest