The Museum of the Moving Image has announced the retrospective film series “Natural Transgressions: The Films of Carlos Reygadas” to take place June 8-13 in New York City. The retrospective series will screen all five features by Reygadas along with select shorts, and culminates with a special preview screening of Our Time / Nuestro tiempo—in anticipation to its U.S. theatrical release—with Reygadas and protagonist Natalia López in person.
From the moment he arrived on the film scene 17 years ago with his debut feature Japón, director Reygadas has been the complete package: a mature and accomplished artist who is both in dialogue with the masters of the form and operating on his own plane. Armed with a full arsenal of aesthetic and narrative tools and persistently fearless in their deployment, Reygadas makes films that are not only unique within contemporary cinema but in many ways distinct from one another, most evident in the passage from the urban tableaus of Battle in Heaven (2005) to the expansive landscapes of Silent Light (2007).
Yet as his subsequent films—Post Tenebras Lux (2012) and Our Time (2018)—have exemplified, the common threads of Reygadas’s work are a frank, often merciless reckoning with tensions and imbalances between social classes, and a parallel, not unrelated friction between fiction and reality, artifice and nature. While countrymen Cuarón, del Toro, and Iñárritu have waded into the mainstream, Reygadas continues to forge his own turbulent stream, chasing demons—his own, his culture’s, humanity’s—and shaping entirely new ways of understanding the world.
