New York City’s Film Forum will host a one weeklong run of a new 4K restoration of Emilio Fernández’s unseen gem of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema musical noir Victims of Sin / Víctimas del pecado. Starring Cuban-born acting-dancing sensation Ninón Sevilla and with a cinematography by the legendary Gabriel Figueroa, the musical noir will screen from Friday, October 6 to Thursday, October 12.
Sevilla plays Violeta, a dancer headlining the divey “Cabaret Changoo,” who rescues, then mothers, an abandoned baby from a garbage can to the ire of zoot-suited, low-life father Rodolfo Acosta. Motherhood forces Violeta to give up her career, but kindhearted club owner, Santiago, saves her from a life of poverty and prostitution—until Rodolfo, freed from prison, seeks to reclaim his son.
Magnificently staged musical numbers with impassioned songs and performances by Sevilla, an icon of Mexican cinema and a purveyor of African, Caribbean, and Cuban dance styles, feature an appearance by legendary mambo king Pérez Prado.
Victims of Sin is one of twenty collaborations between director Fernández (Enamorada, María Candelaria, La Perla), and Gabriel Figueroa, considered Mexico’s greatest cinematographer. Influenced by Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva México!, and taught by cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane), Figueroa worked with every luminary—at home and internationally—shooting 235 films in over 50 years, including Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, John Ford’s The Fugitive, and John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography in 1964. Film Forum presented a 19-film retrospective of his work in 2015.
This new 4K restoration of the film was produced by Permanencia Voluntaria and Viviana García-Besné (Mexico), and Cinema Preservation Alliance (USA) and Peter Conheim. The film is distributed in the US by Janus Films.
