“I love night people, I love the downtrodden … I like the great sufferers because they make for great storytelling. Great sufferers are ambiguous and mysterious and that is what art should ultimately be.” —Arturo Ripstein

Tapping into his native cinema’s rich vein of popular genres like the melodrama and the western, the iconoclastic Mexican director Arturo Ripstein would both passionately adopt and parody their wildest excesses. Ripstein was poised at a critical juncture in Mexico’s cinematic culture: that is, between its “golden age”—his films featured some of its late-career brightest stars—and the dawn of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano (directors like Carlos Reygadas and Guillermo del Toro often cite his influence on their work). Born into a filmmaking family, Ripstein shot his debut feature at only 21 years old. An exiled Luis Buñuel was his creative mentor, and perhaps it is from him that the young director honed his absurdist and darkly humorous worldview, as well as a knife-sharp critical lens on matters of church and country. The nuclear family doesn’t fare so well either: Ripstein would see it as “a catalyst for destruction” in his films, a hellish source of entrapment, patriarchal obsession, and fear. With a refined taste for the sleazier sides of life, Ripstein’s sets delight in tawdry, color-saturated decor and louche environments like tequila-soaked bars and garish bordellos.

Ripstein would go on to collaborate with some of the great and the good of Latin American literature, specializing in literary adaptations and collaborations with renowned writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, and Carlos Fuentes. While his radical contributions to the cinema are multiple, it is his queer and anti-machismo reworkings of popular genres that helped catalyze major changes in the Mexican cinema of the ‘60s and ’70s. Ripstein reworked generic conventions and brought in fresh enemies: outwardly eschewing prejudice in all its forms, calling out the limitations of bourgeois respectability, and railing against the horrors of violence and the toxicity of machismo. Ripstein’s cinema takes the ogres of prejudice head-on and populates itself with a new cast of unconventional heroes: down-and-outs, loners, transvestites, sex workers, and homosexuals. His cinema surveys a world of moral decay and macabre melodrama with a humane eye for those caught in its web. Such is life!