by Alfredo Galindo
The Awards season is on, and one of the big bets on films coming from Mexico is the latest version of the Juan Rulfo classic novella” Pedro Páramo”, which is going to have its world premiere in a few more days in the Toronto Film Festival where it´s nominated for the Best Platform Prize and just released its trailer announcing its release on Netflix for November 6.
About Rodrigo Prieto
Cinematographer/director Rodrigo Prieto with actor Tenoch Huerta on set of Pedro Paramo.
Prieto, cinematographer of one of the best Mexican auteurs of contemporary cinema such as Alejandro G. Iñarritu on films like “Amores Perros” (2000); “21 Grams” (2003) and “Babel” (2006), got his first Academy Award nomination for his work with Ang lee in “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) and his other three nominations under the direction of a master of cinema such as Martin Scorsese for “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013); “Silence” (2016) and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023) but never has won, but that could change with his directorial feature film debut as for the first look on the trailer “Pedro Páramo” could become the second Mexican film to win in the Best Foreign Language Film category after Alfonso Cuarón´s “Roma”, also a Netflix production, became the first on 2019.
Trailer Reaction
Starting from the opening, we see a long shot of Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) who arrives at the arid ghostown of Comala to meet his father Pedro Páramo, and although personally I was waiting for more impressive shots, like that the rest of the images are more concise, focusing in the rest of the main characters of the story such as Pedro Páramo (Manuel García Rulfo) and some of the female characters portrayed by Ariel Winners Ilse Salas and Dolores Heredia, among others. I think thats what Prieto, who has proven that he his a master of light, has the main concern, to bring back the characters to life in the most authentic and respectful way. This time for the big screen and that the streaming as the former adaptations of the tale like Carlos Velo´s 1967 and José Bolaños´1977 were good efforts on its time but didn´t satisfy at all Rulfo´s admirers and the general public as well.