Natural Transgressions: The Films of Carlos Reygadas

From the moment he arrived on the film scene seventeen years ago with his debut feature Japón, Mexican filmmaker Carlos 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. This retrospective encompasses all five features by Carlos Reygadas along with select shorts, and culminates with a special preview screening of Our Time, with Reygadas and Natalia López in person. Our Time opens theatrically on June 14 at the Landmark Quad Cinema, courtesy of Monument Releasing.