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Part of The Age of Innocence: Growing Up in the Movies!
Join Jeffrey Bender as we rush into the heady days of youth (and all the emotional turmoil that goes with it) in this six-film survey about childhood and adolescence as depicted through the cinematic medium. Parents and their children are encouraged to attend the films in this series! (A content advisory for each film can be found at the bottom of the film's page.)
An Academy Award–winning dark fable set five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pan’s Labyrinth encapsulates the rich visual style and genre-defying craft of Guillermo del Toro. Eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero, in a mature and tender performance) comes face to face with the horrors of fascism when she and her pregnant mother are uprooted to the countryside, where her new stepfather (Sergi López), a sadistic captain in General Francisco Franco’s army, hunts down Republican guerrillas refusing to give up the fight. The violent reality in which Ofelia lives merges seamlessly with her fantastical interior world when she meets a faun in a decaying labyrinth and is set on a strange, mythic journey that is at once terrifying and beautiful. In his revisiting of this bloody period in Spanish history, del Toro creates a vivid depiction of the monstrosities of war infiltrating a child’s imagination and threatening the innocence of youth.
Presented in Spanish with English subtitles.
Recommended Age for Children: 14+ (graphic violence, disturbing war-related content, moderate profanity, tobacco use)
Jeffrey Bender
Jeffrey Bender has hosted a number of in-person and online Film Talks with the Westdale, most recently a three-film 'select-rospective' on the films of Mel Brooks and Whodunnit at the Westdale, a series focusing on classic murder-mysteries from the 60s and 70s. He joins us this fall to host the The Age of Innocence, a selection of films told from the perspective of childhood and adolescence, as well as serving as one of the guest speakers for Noir-vember, featuring a survey of classic and contemporary film noir.