Nine Queens

Nueve reinas

Argentina

2000

114 Min

Color

1.85:1

Spanish

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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CAST Gastón Pauls, Ricardo Darín, Graciela Tenenbaum, Leticia Brédice, María Mercedes Villagara, Pochi Ducasse, Gabriel Correa, Ernesto Arias, Luis Armesto

SOUND Eduardo Prus, Guillermo Rodríguez, Luciano Specos, Oscar Velzi

Toronto (Contemporary World Cinema), London (World Cinema), Telluride, AFI FEST (International Competition), Mar del Plata

Synopsis

Early one morning, Marcos observes Juan successfully pulling off a bill-changing scam on a cashier, and then getting caught as he attempts to pull the same trick on the next shift. Marcos steps in, claiming to be a policeman, and drags Juan out of the store. Once they are back on the street, Marcos reveals himself to be a fellow swindler with a game of much higher stakes in mind, and he invites Juan to be his partner in crime. A once-in-a-lifetime scheme seemingly falls into their laps – an old-time con man enlists them to sell a forged set of extremely valuable rare stamps, The Nine Queens. The tricky negotiations that ensue bring into the picture a cast of suspicious characters, including Marcos’ sister Valeria, their younger brother Federico and a slew of thieves, conmen and pickpockets. As the deceptions mount, it becomes more and more difficult to figure out who is conning whom. —IMDb

Director

Fabián Bielinsky

Fabián Bielinsky (3 February 1959 – 29 June 2006) was an Argentine film director born in Buenos Aires.

He started to make films early in his life, while still a high school student in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, after graduation he started studying psychology, a career he shortly followed and dropped out in favor to enroll in the Centro de Experimentacion y Realizacion Cinematografica (CERC, actually ENERC, INCAA’s film school), to later graduate from said institution in 1983 with a short film called La Espera.

He directed his first film, Nine Queens (original title Nueve Reinas) in 2000, and the second one, El Aura, in 2005, which he was going to present in Edinburgh, at the International Film Festival a month later. Both films starred Ricardo Darín in the lead role and Alejandro Awada in a supporting role.

Bielinsky died from a heart attack, in 2006, at only 47 years of age, while he was in São Paulo, Brazil, doing a casting for an advertisement. read more