Instituto Cervantes Pekin to host Mexican film fest for World Book Day

The Instituto Cervantes will be screening five Mexican films adapted from classic Mexican novels for a mini-film festival starting on Friday. The festival is running in conjunction with World Book Day on April 23.

A film directed by Carlos Vela, Pedro Páramo (1966), will be screened on World Book Day, and is based on the classic novella by Juan Rulfo that is widely regarded to have kick started the “magical realism” period in the Latin arts. Highly symbolic and metaphorical, the film follows a father’s search for his son during the Mexican Revolution and regarded by critics as the “Citizen Kane of Mexican cinema.”

The Mexican embassy in Beijing told the Global Times that they chose to highlight Pedro Páramo because it’s the most widely known novel outside of Latin America.