Viridiana won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1961. Franco’s censors prohibited it. The Vatican’s official newspaper condemned it. In 1996, on the centenary of the birth of Spanish cinema, critics declared it the greatest Spanish film. In 2002, Britain’s Sight & Sound, one of the world’s most prestigious film magazines, listed it among the world’s 100 best films. No everyday movie, it is open to countless interpretations to this day.
Viridiana is a novice nun. She goes to visit her uncle before retreating behind the walls of the convent. From a closed world, she enters a world where everyone is trying to live according to the rules of their own closed world. It proves a trial that is difficult to surmount.
The film’s director Luis Buñuel is not an artist easy to decipher. His characters are governed not by events in the outside world, but by the ideas, passions, symbols, desires and morals at play within them. Buñuel is sometimes surreal, sometimes perplexingly objective, symbolic and passionate – a defining talent of 20th century cinema. In this Moments of Truth series, we will also get to see his 1970 film Tristana, which is in a certain sense an expansion on Viridiana.

This series is supported by the Cervantes Institute and the Spanish Embassy.

Presented by: Palace of Arts