On the surface, like a Latin Waiting for Godot, nothing “happens” in Pin Boy. But as the story contemplatively unfolds, we are privy to the quotidian details of a young man's life both at home and at work where, at the last manual bowling alley on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Adrián sets pins and returns balls. Cousin Nancy and idiosyncratic coworkers teach him about a world well beyond their cramped microcosm that includes diverse cultural and historical icons: Monroe, Warhol, Einstein, Joplin, Darwin, Shakespeare. As the camera surveys Adrián's handsome face, a Mean Streets-era Robert DeNiro (sans his kinetic energy) comes to mind, and director Ana Poliak is unafraid to linger on that visage-first-timer Adrián Suárez's open, curiously intelligent countenance reveals in the subtlest gestures his character's every inquisitive musing. The characters demonstrate no tiresome identity crises or anxiety, just a pervasive poetic melancholy that saturates their hearts-and ours. As one of the characters says, “You can find stories everywhere,” and, indeed, the wondrously observant and original Poliak has not only found but delivered a transcendent one in Pin Boy. The film deservedly won the top jury prize in last year's Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.