Mexican director Arturo Ripstein will be be honored at this year’s Venice Film Festival with a Special Biennale Award in recognition of his fifty-year career.
“Arturo Ripstein is the most vital, tenacious and original director of the generation that made its debut in the mid-sixties, the heir of the golden age of Mexican studio films and the forerunner of the new generation of contemporary authors such as Carlos Reygadas, Guillermo del Toro and Nicolás Pereda, each of whom in their own way, recognizes the profound debt that they owe to his work” said Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice Film Festival.
“In his so many unforgettable films, most of them co-written with Paz Alicia Garciadiego, Ripstein has brought to life a restless and afflicted universe, populated with characters pathetically on the verge of the abyss into which they are destined to fall. The strange blend of beauty and brutality, compassion and violence, irony and sadness, adds a wholly personal dimension to his cinema, which delves its roots into popular tragedy and the atmospheres of melodrama, which he cleverly re-elaborates. These elements are also to be found, their power and beauty intact, in his latest film, which the Venice Film Festival has the pleasure of presenting in its world premiere screening,” Barbera added.
The award will be presented to the Mexican director on Thursday, September 10 in the Palazzo del Cinema’s Sala Grande, before the world premiere of his most recent film La calle de la amargura / Bleak Street (pictured right).
