Battle in Heaven Critics Choice 2025
Genre
SPECIAL PROGRAMME
Release Date
19 Jul 2025 (Sat)
Category
--- (HK), ---(Macau)
Running Time
98 Minutes
Language
Spanish
Subtitle
Chinese and English
Director
Carlos Reygadas
Cast
Marcos Hernández, Anapola Mushkadiz, Berta Ruiz, David Bronstein
Synopsis
Following a botched kidnapping attempt that left a child dead, the dark- skinned and obese chauffeur Marcos wrestles with guilt while becoming obsessed with his wealthy employer’s daughter Ana, newly returned from abroad and a dabbler in high-class prostitution. Opening with an explicit, slo-mo fellatio (scored ethereally to Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil”), Reygadas’s provocative vision of social inequality scandalised audiences at Cannes with its potent mixture of religious feeling, avant-garde shock tactics, the autobiographical blending of documentary and fiction (Reygadas cast his own family driver as Marcos while Ana is a well-to-do nonprofessional), and sheer cinematic spectacle. Marcos’s journey towards redemption through sin takes viewers on a tour of Mexico City and its surrounding countryside that characteristically for the auteur juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, with a notable accent on the disposable ugliness of the mundane. While Reygadas’s lurid sensationalism may leave him open to charges of exploitation, the film appears in retrospect prophetic not only of our present world divided between the haves and the have nots, but of the cinema it has inspired, whose opposing paradigms must be ROMA (2018) and PARASITE (2019) – visions poised between hope for reconciliation and fear of retribution.Post-screening talk in Cantonese with journalist Jacky Lin & film critic Derek
Lam.
Lam.
Following a botched kidnapping attempt that left a child dead, the dark- skinned and obese chauffeur Marcos wrestles with guilt while becoming obsessed with his wealthy employer’s daughter Ana, newly returned from abroad and a dabbler in high-class prostitution. Opening with an explicit, slo-mo fellatio (scored ethereally to Tavener’s “The Protecting Veil”), Reygadas’s provocative vision of social inequality scandalised audiences at Cannes with its potent mixture of religious feeling, avant-garde shock tactics, the autobiographical blending of documentary and fiction (Reygadas cast his own family driver as Marcos while Ana is a well-to-do nonprofessional), and sheer cinematic spectacle. Marcos’s journey towards redemption through sin takes viewers on a tour of Mexico City and its surrounding countryside that characteristically for the auteur juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, with a notable accent on the disposable ugliness of the mundane. While Reygadas’s lurid sensationalism may leave him open to charges of exploitation, the film appears in retrospect prophetic not only of our present world divided between the haves and the have nots, but of the cinema it has inspired, whose opposing paradigms must be ROMA (2018) and PARASITE (2019) – visions poised between hope for reconciliation and fear of retribution.Post-screening talk in Cantonese with journalist Jacky Lin & film critic Derek
Lam.
Lam.
