10 · 04 · 08

Enjoying Purgatory

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]Cinépolis Centro auditorium 4. A full house awaited the special screening of Roberto Rochín’s Purgatorio which is based on the stories of Juan Rulfo. Pedro Armendáriz enters, greets the public and says, “the beauty is on her way,” referring to the imminent arrival of Ana Claudia Talancón, who upon entering thanks theatergoers for coming.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Batel, vice president of the FICM, welcomes the film’s director Roberto Rochín, as well as the producer Gabriela Castañeda and actor Ana Claudia Talancón.

At the end of the movie, Rochín explained that what brings the three stories together in this project is “the border between life and death,” and that the hardest part was “maintaining consistency throughout these years to keep the texts intact and adapt the actors so that they could say their lines and look natural.”

Talancón, when asked about how she plays her characters and what happens when she’s done with them, she said: “Every project is different. I can build the structures of personality depending on the script. When I’m done, I cast them off. I learn from some of them, others are fun for me and others make me suffer quite a bit.”

The part of the movie that stands out the most is its cinematography. Explaining how he crafted it, the director said, “using photographs from the period, both those that Rulfo took from the perspective of documenting and poetry, as well as those taken by Gabriel Figueroa and André Bresson, because it needed the ambience and feeling of those years and our resources were limited for doing all this. I also used stock footage in the mix. We used black and white and colored it by hand. In the third story we used desaturation to make it look like an old photograph and give it that richness and expressionist style. We also used special effects.”