Post Tenebras Lux. Opening scene.
Doors 7.30 PM
Film 8.00 PM
Juan and his wealthy urban family exchange their home in the city for a simple life in the Mexican countryside, where they live, love and suffer in a world apart. The two worlds collide, a marriage disintegrates, while the children play on.
Post Tenebras Lux – the Latin title means ‘The Light After Darkness’ – takes its cues from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975). Framed in the now little-used Academy ratio, it stitches together fragments of personal memory and fantasy, garnished with a smattering of visual effects and the odd hint of social commentary, to build a poetic, psychedelic rhapsody in which the director’s tendencies towards abstract expressionism are allowed off the leash. (Tony Rayns)
DIRECTOR: CARLOS REYGADAS
Starring: Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Nathalia Acevedo, Rut Reygadas, Eleazar Reygadas
Cinematograhy: Alexis Zabe
Mexico, France, Netherlands, Germany
2012
115 MINS
RATING – 18
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 Andrei 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)
Carlos Reygadas
“An opus magnum that reminds us of cinema’s great.”
“Arthouse virtuoso Carlos Reygadas takes a poetic trip into his own heart of darkness”