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“Before We Forget” begins with a “perfect ending.” Or at least that’s what Matias (Juan Pablo Di Pace) is told by his producer, Paolo (Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna), who’s desperate to wrap up their last day of filming. In the scene they’ve just shot, one young man reaches out to another who’s sleeping in a bed beside him, hand outstretched. But Matias isn’t satisfied. How can he just end things there on an empty note of such longing?

Paolo talks him out of filming yet another take where the lead touches the other boy’s face and instead urges his friend to wrap things up. Matias gives in and the crew applauds, eager to finish and get back to their loved ones after working six hours overtime. The unfulfilled promise of that so-called “perfect ending” continues to bother Mathias, however, because it speaks...

Actor turned writer and director Juan Pablo Di Pace is making his feature debut with a decades-spanning meta romance. The star co-directs “Before We Forget” with Andrés Pepe Estrada from a script he wrote; the iconic late Norman Lear, who died in 2023, is an executive producer.

“Before We Forget” is a staggeringly beautiful depiction of trying (and sometimes failing) to remember every detail of our first loves. Di Pace leads the film as Matias, an Argentine filmmaker grappling with an unfinished movie that was inspired by his friendship with a Swedish classmate he met at boarding school in 1997. As the logline teases, “their bond, defined by tenderness and fascination, is abruptly severed when Alexander (Oscar Morgan) is expelled, leaving young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) with a story of unspoken emotions. Twenty-five years later, Matias reopens Pandora’s box, coming face-to-face with Alexander (August Wittgenstein) once again. As life begins to imitate art,...

Exclusive: Twenty-Nine Palms Entertainment, the new London-based international sales and production company launched by Edoardo Bussi last month, has unveiled Before We Forget as its first global acquisition for its upcoming Cannes slate.

The nostalgic, coming-of-age story marks the feature directorial debut of Argentinian actor Juan Pablo Di Pace, and Andrés Pepe Estrada, who is best known as an award-winning editor on films such as Argentina, 1985 and Upon Open Sky).

Di Pace stars as man looking back on the moments that shaped him, returning to memories of his student days in 1990s Italy, to rediscover the friendships, heartbreaks, and quiet triumphs of youth. As the line between past and present begins to blur, he understands that growing up never truly ends, and that looking back can be the only way to move forward.

Originally titled Duino, the Argentinian-Italian-u.S. co-production is lead produced by Di Pace’s Momento Films.

NewFest, the annual New York-based LGBTQ+ film festival, has officially unveiled its 2024 award winners.

The 36th annual festival hosted a Filmmaker & Awards Brunch at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn to announce the honorees selected by both the festival jury and 2024 audiences. The jury was composed of leading LGBTQ+ creatives, allies, filmmakers, artists, activists, journalists, and entertainment professionals.

The top honor of the Grand Jury Award for U.S. Narrative Feature was awarded to trans neo-noir thriller “Ponyboi,” which was written and produced by NewFest alum River Gallo, who also stars alongside Dylan O’Brien, Victoria Pedretti, Murray Bartlett, and Indya Moore. Gallo’s 2019 short film on which the feature is based won the New York Short jury grand prize at NewFest31. Esteban Arango directed the feature.

“This is a film that, we felt, bridged the space of humanistic storytelling at its highest level,” the U.S. Narrative Feature category jurors of creative executive Sarah Flores,...

Filmmaker Juan Pablo Di Pace discussed the meaning behind his new semi-autobiographical film Duino in his new uInterview.

Duino, which premiered at the LGBTQ Newfest film festival in New York City, follows an Argentinian filmmaker as he struggles to complete a film about his unrequited first love with a schoolmate. When he unexpectedly is offered the opportunity to reconstruct his memories, he revisits the past in the hope of finding a new ending to his story.

Di Pace, known for his roles in Fuller House and Momma Mia, gave some insight into his decision to step behind the camera for this movie to fulfill his childhood dream of directing:

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“I’ve been in the kind of actor-performer seat for 23 years now, I think, but since childhood, I really wanted to direct,” di Pace told uInterview founder Erik Meers.

The Frameline Film Festival has announced the winners from its 2024 program.

The top honors went to Luke Gilford’s “National Anthem,” which took home the Outstanding First Feature Award, and Chloé Barreau’s “Fragments of a Life Loved,” which won Outstanding Documentary Feature.

Frameline, the world’s largest and longest-running LGBTQ film festival, ran from June 19–29, with 120 screenings, programs and events held in theaters across the Bay Area, including the Herbst Theatre and Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.

Highlights of the festival included the Castro Theatre’s first-ever celebration of Juneteenth — a block party that featured the official re-lighting of the venue’s iconic neon blade sign and marquee, performances from the all-Black drag collective and a special outdoor screening of “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero.”

Other highlights included a special 30th anniversary screening of the 4K restoration of “Go Fish,” attended by Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner, the...

Exclusive: The 48th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival aka Frameline48 wrapped over the weekend and presented it awards after a slate of 120 in-person screenings and programs featuring international LGBTQ+ filmmakers and Bay Area artists.

Frameline48 highlights included a 30th anniversary screening of the 4K restoration of Go Fish; the “queer premiere” of Anthony Schatteman’s Young Hearts; the U.S. premiere of Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés P. Estrada’s Duino, world premieres of Deborah Craig’s Sally! (co-directed by Jörg Fockele and Ondine Rarey) and Osama Chami’s Una película barata; and screenings of Harrison Xu, Ivan Leung and Katherine Dudas’ Extremely Unique Dynamic, Marco Berger’s The Astronaut Lovers (Los amantes astronautas) and Luke Willis’ Lady Like, which saw the director and Lady Camden, the film’s subject, in attendance.

The Frameline kickoff celebration featured a live performance by singer, songwriter and producer Linda Perry, followed...

This review originally posted Sept. 3, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Near the rousing climax of Santiago Mitre’s courtroom procedural “Argentina, 1985,” making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, an affecting phone call between a mother and a son shines as an ideological lighthouse, offering the promise that people’s long-held beliefs can evolve for the better. And if one individual can change, then an entire society can reevaluate its faults to amend them.

This impeccably executed portrait of a country at a crossroads chronicles at length the Trial of the Juntas, a nearly unthinkable opportunity in the mid-1980s for the first government of Argentina’s embryonic democracy to try nine generals and admirals (including dictator Jorge Rafael Videla) for crimes against humanity committed during the military dictatorship in a civil court of law.

Tasked with the titanic task of bringing justice...

Rather like the arc of the moral universe, “Argentina, 1985” is long, but bends toward justice. Effectively dramatizing the country’s landmark Trial of the Juntas, history’s first instance of a civilian justice system convicting a military dictatorship, Santiago Mitre’s broad, sprawling, heart-on-sleeve courtroom saga may draw from the same nightmarish period of history that has informed much of Argentine cinema’s most essential, haunting works — from 1985’s Oscar-winning “The Official Story” to last year’s “Azor” — but eschews any subtle arthouse stylings for a storytelling sensibility as robustly populist as anything by Sorkin or Spielberg.

Small wonder, then, that Amazon Studios has boarded a film clearly aiming to be both a domestic smash and an international crossover hit — buoyed by the reliable star power of Ricardo Darín, his signature suaveness tempered by a walrus mustache and boxy ‘80s frames as Julio Strassera, the dogged prosecutor who took on this charged,...