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FILMS
NAZARIN
DIR. LUIS BUÑUEL
DRAMA (18+) MEXICO 1959 94 MINS
WITH: FRANCISCO RABAL, MARGA
LOPEZ, RITA MACEDO, JESÚS FERNÁNDEZ,
IGNACIO TARSO

WRITTEN BY BUÑUEL, JULIO ALEJANDRO,
FROM THE NOVEL BY BENITO PÉREZ
GALDÓS.

1958 Cannes Film Award for Excellence in the
Foreign Film Market.

Certainly one of the most beautifully photographed of all Buñuel’s films, Nazarín captures the harsh Mexican landscape for a tale of a turn-of-the-century wandering cleric who has shed his priest’s garments in hopes of comforting the poor, free from the Church’s chastising shadow. Two desperate women and an assortment of life’s outcasts accompany him. His is a Christ like effort, to wring charity out of a peasantry locked into the absurd cruelty of their environment, but also locked into the very material reality of being human. Like Preston Sturges’s Sullivan in his Travels, Nazarín’s experience among the wretched teaches him the nature of escape.