18
Jan/17

THE END IS THE BEGINNING: PAN’S LABYRINTH

18
Jan/17
Guillermo de Toro creates a mystical fairy-tale world in PAN’S LABYRINTH

Guillermo de Toro creates a mystical fairy-tale world in PAN’S LABYRINTH

NITEHAWK BRUNCH SCREENINGS: PAN’S LABYRINTH (EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO) (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, January 21, and Sunday, January 22, 11:15 am
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
panslabyrinth.co.uk

The closing night film of the 2006 New York Film Festival and an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a breathtaking fairy tale set in 1944 Spain, shortly after the Spanish Civil War. When her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), marries Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) must move to the middle of the woods, where Vidal and his small group of soldiers are defending the last vestiges of Franco’s Fascist regime against a group of resistance fighters seeking peace and freedom for all. Led by a mysterious flying creature, the adventurous Ofelia makes her way through an ancient underground labyrinth, where she meets the Faun (Hellboy’s Doug Jones), who tells her that she just might be the reborn, long-missing princess they’ve been waiting centuries for — but first she’ll have to perform three tasks to prove that she has returned to claim her throne. As Vidal shows more concern for the baby that Carmen is carrying than for Carmen herself — and also brutally tortures and kills anyone who gets in his way, whether it is one of the revolutionaries or one of his own people — Ofelia meets a dangerous yet engaging series of beings as she hopes for her fairy-tale dreams to come true and erase the nightmares of the real world. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone) has cleverly balanced fantasy and reality, alternating between scenes of horror and graphic violence aboveground and below as seen through the eyes of a brave young girl trapped in both. Nominated for six Academy Awards and winner of three (for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup), Pan’s Labyrinth is being shown January 21 and 22 at 11:15 am in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Nitehawk Brunch Screenings” and “The End Is the Beginning,” the latter consisting of movies in which the ending is told at the beginning. Inspired by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the series, which also featured Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, concludes January 28 and 29 with Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning American Beauty.