The Spider Game (Pisingana)

Director: Leopoldo Pinzon
Screenwriters: German Pinzon

Institute History

  • 1990 Sundance Film Festival

Description

Pisingana may refer to a child's game based on a spider web, but there is nothing playful about the domestic web in which a young peasant girl finds herself trapped. A victim of military brutality (or were the "soldiers" really guerrillas in disguise?—the truth is never clear in Colombian fiction), Graciela, having been terribly abused, is forcibly relocated out of "enemy territory' into the city. She finds work as a menial with a middle-class Bogotano family whose repressed family life, although ostensibly normal, has deteriorated to the point where any catalyst would be cathartic and catastrophic.

However, what might seem familiar is inflected with the canniest of deadpan perspectives that pushes framing and performance just off center into a strange and compelling kind of hyperrealism.

Pinzon, born in Colombia in 1939, studied filmmaking in Prague in the mid sixties during the golden period of Czechoslovakian cinema. He completed several short films in Colombia before making his first feature, La Abuela (The Grandmother), in 1981. Pisingana is Pinzon's second feature.


Tuesday, January 23, 10:30 a.m.
Holiday Village Cinema I

Sunday, January 28, 5:15 p.m.
Holiday Village Cinema II

$5.00

— Laurence Kardish

Screening Details

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