Arturo Ripstein Director of "The Reasons of the Heart"

The ideal film festival would go like this, Ripstein said. You go to Cannes or Venice and you enter the competition, and by that I mean that all applicants for a certain year receive the same script and the same amount of money, and they are given a year to come back with a film. You have a limited margin of change in the script and the budget according to your country, but the concept stands. You present all the films in the next edition of the festival with no names attached to them except the country, so you would not know who the filmmaker was. Only then you will know who the best filmmaker was. Ripstein takes the idea of film festivals to an Olympic echelon: It’s like you take my three-week shoot film and put it in the same competition with Apocalypse Now. Where in the world would this be a fair competition? The Mexican director concern about the way film festivals are developing stems from the increasing business control over them, and of course the American influence. He recalls a visit to Cannes years ago to find a huge advertisement of Godzilla: I thought to myself, this festival has gone from Godard to Godzilla…God grief!

Later that night Ripstein was introduced by Peter Scarlet, executive director of the ADFF, to a full theatre coming to attend the regional premiere of his entry for the narrative competition, The Reasons of the Heart (Las razones del corazón), a revision of the French classic Madame Bovary.

Once the screening started Ripstein walked out of the theatre and did not come back until the end credits. He explained during the Q&A’s session how painful it is to watch his own films, and that the only way to forget what he has just finished is to work on a new film.

The next morning we had our official appointment for the photo shoot. Sitting in an empty, dim café, the Mexican director pondered on his affinity to retrieve the same motives in his adaptations - he is one of the few filmmakers who still adapt classic novels onto the screen. His repeated patterns revolve around certain themes — in his continuous one-shot scenes the camera floats around his troubled characters in their sordid surroundings, driven by their hearts to their doom. When asked about these cinematographic recurrences, Arturo Ripstein simply replied: There is a word in Spanish that goes for being stupidly stubborn, as in falling in the same hole twice, on the same day.

As I was praising his stubbornness, he gave insight into the pressure he had to face with 1986’s Deep Crimson (Profundo carmesi), when one of the producers forced him to cut out twenty minutes for the release of the film. Our discussion then went on the question of censorship at large. It’s a phenomenon that deserves to be studied more, because one dismisses it instantly as an enemy, but it has a strange correlation with creation, Arturo Ripstein explained. Censorship always existed. In my time it used to be moral, where you could not show breasts or harsh violence because it was immoral, then it became political. Now it’s the worst kind of censorship: economic censorship. You could avoid moral censorship by being sly, and you avoid political censorship by using metaphors, but there is no argument against economic censorship.

Despite his extensive carrier, dating back to working as Luis Buńuel’s apprentice, Arturo Ripstein does not consider himself a successful filmmaker. My work is known to some cinephiles, but I’ve always been a peripheral artist, and now that I am an old filmmaker it’s even the periphery of the periphery. After a smile, Ripstein concluded: This is not modesty, quite the opposite. Modesty pertains to the well-bred and the secure, and I am not.

By Mohamed Beshir