THE CASTLE OF PURITY
El castillo de la pureza

Mexico 1972 | 110 mins
Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Arturo Ripstein

Monday, Aug 28
7:30 PM | VIFF Vancity Theatre

This special co-presentation with the Consulate General of Mexico in Vancouver and VIFF’s Vancity Theatre will be accompanied by an introduction “From Analog to Digital” given by Héctor Ramírez Williams, Director of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) Archives.

In this darkly claustrophobic masterpiece, Gabriel Lima (played by Claudio Brook, Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert) decides he must protect his family from the corruption of the modern world by keeping them locked up for 18 years inside their ramshackle house. He is governed almost obsessively by ideas about the evils of humanity contained in the philosophy books that he reads. His three children—Future, Utopia and Free Will—are supposed to follow the path that he determines for them, but the maddening confinement and Gabriel’s inability to keep his family completely untouched by the outside world, will slowly undermine his castle of purity.

A haunting, melancholic fable by one of the true mavericks of Mexican cinema.”

Gabriel Lima está convencido de que la gente es mala por naturaleza y de que su familia puede sufrir las consecuencias. Por eso encierra durante años a su esposa y a sus hijos en una auténtica fortaleza. Cualquier precaución es poca para evitar que la maldad del ser humano penetre en el Castillo de la Pureza.

Producer: Angélica Ortíz
Writers: Arturo Ripstein, José Emilio Pacheco
Cinematographer: Alex Phillips
Editors: Rafael Castanedo, Eufemio Rivera
Cast: 
Claudio Brook, Rita Macedo, Arturo Beristáin, Diana Bracho, Gladys Bermejo, María Barber, Mario Castillón Bracho, María Guadalupe Delgado, Andrea del Llano, Alejandra Jiménez

 

Arturo Ripstein (Mexico City, 1943) began his career as assistant director (uncredited) to Luis Buñuel in El ángel exterminador (1962). He made his first film at the age of 21, Tiempo de morir (1965), a western written by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. He developed a signature style of darkly atmospheric visuals and gritty, subversive themes, and with over 23 films to his credit is widely considered one of the crucial Mexican filmmakers of our time.

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