FAUSTO
Mexico/Toronto, 2018

Director: Andrea Bussmann
Spanish, English, French, and Arabic with English subtitles | 70 min
Canada Looks South

Wednesday, August 28 | 5 PM | Cinematheque


On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico rumblings of an earlier time are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy, and dealings with the devil are embedded within the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth, and local entanglements, the veil between reality and fiction, the seen and the unseen, is lifted.

Filmada en la costa oaxaqueña de México, esta obra etnográfica de la directora Andrea Bussmann es una adaptación directa, rigurosa y en gran parte teórica del Fausto de Goethe. Adoptando los ideales anti-empiristas del texto, es un retrato de un lugar y sus habitantes (fallecidos o no) atrapados en el limbo entre lo que es y lo que fue. En una narración silenciosa, los mitos locales se mezclan con la narrativa de Fausto, mientras que las imágenes, tomadas digitalmente y transferidas a 16 mm, se abren a un mundo precolonial donde la tierra y el capital no eran tan sinónimos.



…a direct, rigorous, and largely theoretical adaptation of Goethe’s Faust that wholeheartedly adopts that text’s anti-empiricist ideals. It’s a portrait of a place and its inhabitants (deceased or otherwise) caught in limbo between what is and what was. In hushed narration, local myths commingle with the Faust narrative, while the images, shot digitally and transferred to 16mm, open onto a pre-colonial world, when land and capital were not so synonymous. – Josh Cabrita and Adam Cook, Cinema Scope

Special Jury Prize – Filmmakers of the Present, Locarno International Film Festival, 2018
Best Latin American Film, Mar del Plata Film Festival, 2018

Filmography: Tales of Two Who Dreamt (2016), He Whose Face Gives No Light (2011)


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