Arturo Ripstein will inaugurate the Gijón International Film Festival

The Mexican director, who celebrates fifty years in the industry, will open the 53rd edition of the contest by presenting his latest work, 'La calle de la bittergura'

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein will be in charge of opening the 53rd edition of the Gijón International Film Festival with his new work The street of bitterness.

Ripstein will be present in the Asturian city for what will be the Spanish premiere of a film that has received critical praise at the Venice and Toronto festivals, based on a real event that occurred in Mexico in 2009. The production, marked by the characteristic audiovisual language of its director, narrates the accidental death of two dwarf wrestlers at the hands of prostitutes and has an exceptional cast in which its protagonists stand out: the Mexicans Nora Velázquez and Patricia Reyes Spindola, prolific actress, winner of several Ariel awards. With this work, the director has returned behind the cameras after 4 years since his last feature film, The Reasons of the Heart.

The film, which was presented at the Venice Film Festival out of competition, is written by his trusted screenwriter and wife, Paz Alicia Garciadiego. The story perfectly captures a Mexican reality marked by misery, religion and superstitions, where its protagonists express themselves freely without being judged by the camera lens. Arturo, double winner of the Golden Shell for The Perdition of Men and Beginning and End, takes the viewer to the squalor of a marginal neighborhood within a Mexican city; With an exceptional use of black and white, multi-faceted characters loaded with emotions and feelings are revealed.

Released exclusively in its country of origin through the FilminLatino streaming platform at the same time it was presented at the Italian festival, The street of bitterness marks the 50-year career of Ripstein, one of the standards of Latin American cinema of our time.

The film has been praised by the specialized press as one of the highest points of his cinematography and on November 20th it will be in charge of kicking off one of the international benchmark events for independent and auteur cinema, the Gijón International Film Festival.

50 years of cinema

Born in Mexico City in 1943, Arturo Ripstein has a filmography where you can find more than fifty titles, among which feature films such as The Limitless Place, Life Sentence, The Gospel of Wonders, Deep Crimson o The colonel has no one to write to him. Films that place him as a master of the seventh art and a reference for the new Latin American and, therefore, Mexican cinema. His first steps were with the Aragonese genius, Luís Buñuel, with whom he had a close teacher-student relationship; until he was 21 years old, when his father produced time of deathr, a first work written by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes; but it would be in 1985 with The empire of fortune, his first work with Paz Alicia Garciadiego, the title that would consolidate him internationally with recognition in Havana or San Sebastián, in addition to 8 Ariel awards. Since then, festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Sundance and Guadalajara have continued to recognize his talent, marked by a very personal style.

Together with Ripstein, the 53rd edition of the festival, which will be held from November 20 to 28, will feature many other artistic bets that go beyond the conventional, covering all genres; from the retrospective dedicated to the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most original voices on the international audiovisual scene; to the latest documentary work by a director as renowned as Michael Winterbottom, or also the national premiere of the most recent film by Studio Ghibli, a world leader in animation, among many other proposals.