Argentine actress Agustina Muñoz (seen in many of Matías Piñeiro's films playing various Shakespearean characters), is on her way to Azores in mid-Atlantic in the Spanish-Portuguese co-production staging of Tempest. She is supposed to play Ariel. But when she gets to the volcanic island, she can't get in touch with anyone. Her phone keeps telling her that no such numbers of her contacts exist and everyone on the island is speaking lines from the Shakespear plays while doing their daily chores - shopping at the supermarket, pumping at the gas station, etc. Agustina understandably gets very annoyed by everyone who's acting as if in trance. Then she meets Ariel, played by Spanish actress Irene Escolar, and finds out that the inhabitants of the islands are all characters from the bard's various plays, acting out their plays from beginning to end. At sunset, they must finish their plays and the next day, they start anew, playing the same characters over and over again.
Irene, who has no knowledge of being a real-life actress, is thrown into an existential crisis after Agustina sowing the notion that Ariel shouldn't just follow Prospero's orders because the character's a rebel and they all need to chart their own destiny. In the meantime, Agustina is trying to get out of the island to no avail. She is resigned to help Ariel to finish off the rest of the plays around the island - Hamlet, Tempest, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliette, etc. There is even a Becket character marooned there - because he landed on the wrong island (Becket's characters' island is the next one over this one), walking around alone, mumbling Becket lines.
Lois Patiño, a Spanish visual artist/filmmaker, plays around with the idea of 'life is a stage', with his trademark crossfades with multiple images and static frames breaking up to reveal what's behind the images we are seeing. At one point, the characters, instigated by Augustina, openly question the role of 'creator' and plan to steal Prospero's (and in turn Shakespear's) book and destroy it and write themselves their own destiny and question the man behind the camera even, by breaking the 4th wall.
With stunning Azores' backdrop and his signature color tinted images, Patiño creates another hypnotic, dreamy film that is both thoughtful and whimsical.
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