Babel

France, Mexico, United States

2006

143 Min

Color

1.85:1

Arabic, Berber, French, Japanese, Spanish, English

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.
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DIR Alejandro González Iñárritu

PROD Steve Golin, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jon Kilik

SCR Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro González Iñárritu

CAST Brad Pitt, Rinko Kikuchi, Adriana Barraza, Cate Blanchett, Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho, Said Tarchani, Boubker Ait El Caid, Clifton Collins Jr., Mohamed Akhzam, Peter Wight, Abdelkader Bara, Mustapha Rachidi, Driss Roukhe, Robert Esquivel, Michael Peña, Emilio Echevarría, Yuko Murata, Satoshi Nikaido

ED Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione

MUSIC Gustavo Santaolalla

Cannes (In Competition): Best Director, Technical Grand Prize, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, London, Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastián, Stockholm (Visionary)

Synopsis

4 interlocking stories all connected by a single gun all converge at the end and reveal a complex and tragic story of the lives of humanity around the world and how we truly aren’t all that different. In Morocco, a troubled married couple are on vacation trying to work out their differences. Meanwhile, a Moroccan herder buys a rifle for his sons so they can keep the jackals away from his herd. A girl in Japan dealing with rejection, the death of her mother, the emotional distance of her father, her own self-consciousness, and a disability among many other issues, deals with modern life in the enormous metropolis of Tokyo, Japan. Then, on the opposite side of the world the married couple’s Mexican nanny takes the couple’s 2 children with her to her son’s wedding in Mexico, only to come into trouble on the return trip. Combined, it provides a powerful story and an equally powerful looking glass into the lives of seemingly random people around the world and it shows just how connected we really are. —IMDb

Director

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Born in México City, Mexico, in 1963, Alejandro González Iñárritu started his show-business career in 1984 as a DJ at top-rated Mexican radio station WFM. At the same time he studied filmmaking and theater. From 1988 to 1990 he composed music for six Mexican features, including Garra de tigre (1989). In the 1990s he became one of the youngest producers in Mexican TV: looking for good stories, he read a lot of scripts and one day was introduced to Guillermo Arriaga, a screenwriter, and they planned to make 11 shorts to show the contradictory nature of Mexico City. After three years and 36 drafts, they ended up settling on only three stories and expanding them. That movie, Amores Perros, became a major hit at its release at the Festival de Cannes 2000, where it received the award of the best film by the Semaine de la Critique, and went on to huge worldwide success. It also earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign movie. His second feature, 21 Grams (2003), was also written by Arriaga… read more