Our Time (Carlos Reygadas, Rut Reygadas)
A family lives on a ranch in the Mexican countryside, raising fighting bulls. Esther (Natalia López) is in charge of running the ranch, while her husband Juan (Carlos Reygadas), a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. When Esther becomes infatuated with a horse trainer named Phil, the couple struggle to stride through the emotional crisis.
Reygadas lays bare masculine pathology with a typical bravura in this extraordinarily unsparing dissection of love and marriage, casting himself and his spouse Natalia López at the heart of the piece. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)
CARLOS REYGADAS
Director / Screenwriter / Producer
Mexican filmmaker, Carlos Reygadas, (b. 1971, Mexico City) is revered as one of the most groundbreaking directors in world cinema. He has been named as the one-man third wave of Mexican cinema.
Reygadas studied Law at the University of Mexico, specialising in Armed Conflict Law in London. In 1997, Reygadas decided to quit his profession and moved to Brussels where he discovered a passion for cinema, visiting a cinematheque and voraciously viewing films by directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson. When he encountered Tarkovsky’s films, he realised that emotion could come directly out of the sound and the image and not necessarily from the storytelling. From this moment on, the Russian director became his biggest inspiration.
In 2000, he shot his first feature film, Japón (Japan). The film was presented at 2002 at the Rotterdam and Cannes film festivals. The film received a Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. It was one of the most outstanding and audacious films on the Croisette that year. In 2005, he presented Battle in Heaven, which was selected for Competition in Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize at Río de Janeiro International Film Festival. In 2007, his film Silent Light competed once more for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival winning the Jury Award. For Post Tenebras Lux(Light after Darkness) Carlos Reygadas won the best director prize during Cannes Film Festival 2012. His latest film, Our Time, was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival 2018.
Reygadas’ formally daring and visually inventive narratives present spectacular and frequently unsettling perspectives of Mexican life from the countryside to the big city, all of which he depicts with a mixture of haunting lyricism, curiosity and dread. Even in its more ominous moments, Reygadas’ cinema maintains a transcendental sense of beauty. Inspired by the epic scope of Andrei Tarkovsky, Reygadas also pulls liberally from countless other art film tropes while conveying a poetic stillness that has, over the last decade, developed into his own imprint.
“Reygadas’ films tend to surprise and frustrate viewers in equal measures, but the boldness of his vision tends to win out." - Eric Kohn (IndieWire, 2013)
DIRECTOR: CARLOS REYGADAS
Starring: Natalia López, Carlos Reygadas, Phil Burgers, Rut Reygadas, Maria Hagerman,.
Cinematograhy: Adrian Durazo, Diego García
Mexico/France/Germany/Denmark/ Sweden
2018
177 MINS
RATING – 15
Doors 6.00 PM
Film 6.30 PM
Carlos Reygadas
Poster by Sam Smith
“Mexican visionary, Carlos Reygadas, explores the limits of fidelity.”
“The extended opening might very well be the most beautiful sequence to screen at this year’s Venice film festival. ”