PIN DE FARTIE World Cinema

Adapting Samuel Beckett’s iconic 1957 play “Endgame” with gleeful, reckless abandon, maverick Argentine filmmaker Alejo Moguillansky returns to AFI FEST for the first time since he last adapted the Irish master with his breakthrough film CASTRO (AFI FEST 2009). While Beckett’s original work contained just four characters trapped on stage in a bleak far-off future, Moguillansky takes a symphonic approach, tying together a collection of magnetic duos. There’s the blind Otto (Santiago Gobernori) and his young domestic worker Cleo (Cleo Moguillansky), their rat-a-tat banter set against breathtaking Swiss scenery; in Buenos Aires a pair of actors (Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante) meet every week to rehearse scenes from Beckett’s play, a romance slowly brewing between them; and a tennis-loving son (Moguillansky) reads “Endgame” to his blind mother, their own story reflecting Beckett’s text. Produced by Laura Citarella (TRENQUE LAUQUEN, AFI FEST 2022) and the El Pampero Cine collective, Moguillansky discovers moments of magic in the registers and resonances of “Endgame” as repetitions, refractions, music and dance crescendo into a glittering, literary and formal masterwork. –Josh Gardner