Originally published 1st September 2014 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.
The premise of Matías Piñeiro's They All Lie is deceptively simple: a group of young people move to the Argentinean countryside to pursue various artistic and pseudo-criminal endeavours. A woman paints copies of her ex-boyfriend's work as part of a forgery scheme; another dictates a novel for someone else to write; a man learns a song on his guitar. Piñeiro captures these relatively mundane events, as well as the surreptitious interactions between the group's members, from a distance, moving his camera gracefully around their house as his increasingly complex narrative games unfold. Do they mean anything? Who can say for sure, particularly after one viewing, but the mounting feeling of paranoia and the mastery with which it is all presented is undeniable — even if the results are, at least for now, frustratingly ambiguous.