Endgames: Alejo Moguillansky on Pin de Fartie

"Back to selection(2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective Pin de Fartie El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play's themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky's ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy."

"Each sequence of Pin de Fartie is composed of a pair who re-enact the original one-set play's Hamm and Clov master-slave dynamic. On the shores of Lake Léman in Switzerland, a blind father (Santiago Gobernori) and his daughter (Cleo Moguillansky) embody their resentful, uneven dependence. In Buenos Aires, Laura Paredes and Marcos Ferrante are theater actors rehearsing the play in an apartment across from the Plaza del Congreso, where Beckett slowly becomes an intermediary for their growing affection."

Back to selection (2025) expands Samuel Beckett's Fin de Partie into multiple nested narratives that rework themes of death, departure, and approaching endings. The film stages repeated Hamm-and-Clov pairings across varied settings: a blind father and daughter on the shore of Lake Léman, actors rehearsing across from Buenos Aires's Plaza del Congreso, and domestic duos whose dependencies mirror one another. Two narrators sing ballads and voice inner anxieties like a Greek chorus, while the camera occasionally turns to the cinematographers and crew as they construct props and record foley. Each iteration examines structures of power and the will to continue as relationships approach twilight amid a broader sense of civilizational decline.

Read at Filmmaker Magazine