{ "id": "ep96k5fbxn", "slug": "nazarin", "title": "Nazarín", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1950s", "label": "Drama films 1950s", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1950s" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean · 1946 to 2000: Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "path": [ { "id": "geo.latam", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946", "label": "Latin America and the Caribbean · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical", "label": "Drama and biographical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.latam.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Nazarín (1959) is Luis Buñuel's Mexican black-and-white drama adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós's 1895 novel, starring Francisco Rabal as a quixotic priest; it won the International Prize at Cannes 1959 and appears on the 1995 Vatican film list.", "snippet": "Nazarín (1959) is Luis Buñuel's Mexican black-and-white drama adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós's 1895 novel, starring Francisco Rabal as a quixotic priest; it won the International Prize at Cannes 1959 and appears on the 1995 Vatican film list.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.drama-biographical.drama-films-1950s", "markdown": "# Nazarín\n\n**Nazarín** is a 1959 Mexican black-and-white drama film directed by [Luis Buñuel](https://www.edgepedia.org/luis-bunuel), adapted from [Benito Pérez Galdós](https://www.edgepedia.org/benito-perez-galdos)'s 1895 novel of the same name. It follows Father Nazario, a humble priest whose literal practice of Christian charity brings ruin on himself and nearly everyone he meets, and it won the International Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.[1](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin) • [2](https://www.justwatch.com/es/pelicula/nazarin)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Director / source | Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro from Galdós's 1895 novel[1](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin) |\n| Production | Producciones Barbachano (producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce); cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; music Rodolfo Halffter[1](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin) |\n| Cast | Francisco Rabal (Father Nazario), Marga López (Beatriz), Rita Macedo (Andara), Ignacio López Tarso, Ofelia Guilmáin[1](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin) • [3](https://static.rottentomatoes.com/m/nazarin) |\n| Format | Black and white, Spanish language, about 94 minutes[4](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/nazarin-3379/) |\n| Release | Premiered 11 May 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival; Spanish theatrical release 13 December 1968 with 109,904 spectators[1](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin) • [5](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=418650) |\n| Honor | International Prize at Cannes 1959; included on the 1995 Vatican film list[6](https://sightlines.media/film/35124/nazarin-1959) • [7](https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/anti-clerical-cinema-nazarin-1959/) |\n| Setting | Rural Mexico around 1900, during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz[8](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/grasping-goodness) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nIn Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, the humble priest Nazarín shares his poverty with the needy who live around the mesón of Chanfa. After he protects a prostitute, Andara, who sets fire to the mesón, he is forced to leave the place. On the road his actions, governed by his conception of Christian charity, provoke a series of conflicts.[2](https://www.justwatch.com/es/pelicula/nazarin)\n\nRotten Tomatoes's synopsis adds the two women who accompany him: in a plague-ridden corner of turn-of-the-century Mexico, the pious priest takes in the distraught Beatriz and the fugitive Andara, and sets out on a religious journey with them, alienating or ruining almost everyone he meets and meeting scorn, suspicion, and persecution.[3](https://static.rottentomatoes.com/m/nazarin) The film ends with Nazario alone and stripped of all possessions, with little to validate the worthiness or reward of his mission.[8](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/grasping-goodness)\n\n## From novel to film\n\nGaldós published *Nazarín* in 1895; its protagonist is the priest don Nazario Zaharín.[9](https://revpubli.unileon.es/index.php/LectSigno/article/view/7417) Buñuel began shooting the adaptation in 1958.[10](https://moreliafilmfest.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/17-ficm-cat-todo.pdf) He came to Galdós late: he did not like the writer's work as a young man at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and only began reading his novels after arriving in Mexico.[11](https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/16486?ln=en) Yet he told interviewers, \"It is the only influence I would recognize, that of Galdós, in general on me,\" and a 2021 study concludes that the Canarian writer shaped not only Buñuel's audiovisual universe but the director's underlying philosophy.[12](https://ruidera.uclm.es/bitstreams/caf7b6c7-f0a2-4eb5-99d5-777f3ddbfdda/download)\n\nBuñuel made changes of emphasis. Scholars describe the film as exaggerating padre Nazario's humility and self-mortification relative to the novel, and as an emancipation from the galdosian text rather than a literal translation of it.[13](https://researchrepository.universityofgalway.ie/server/api/core/bitstreams/649a7ec8-204f-4b0d-ae6f-37e2f164f134/content) • [14](https://philarchive.org/archive/COULVM) By one account, what makes the film significant is its ambivalence together with the open hermeneutic framework it offers, since the director took over the work and read it through the lens of his own perspective.[15](https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8221661)\n\n## Themes and interpretation\n\n**Failed sanctity.** Buñuel does not discredit the Church by portraying a hypocritical or venal priest. Father Nazario is a Quixote figure, unable to make any difference in a miserable world no matter how strictly he follows his religious code.[7](https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/anti-clerical-cinema-nazarin-1959/) Buñuel himself glossed the trio of priest and followers as \"There goes Don Quixote and his two Sanchos.\"[16](https://theotherjournal.com/2009/06/nazarin-bunuel-1958-the-ineffectiveness-of-christian-justice/) The film opens the sequence of Buñuel's works on failed sanctity that continues in *Viridiana* (1961), which extends the collaboration with screenwriter Julio Alejandro and the demolition of a would-be saint's charity into open parody.[6](https://sightlines.media/film/35124/nazarin-1959)\n\n**Religion and the director.** Buñuel was raised in a wealthy Catholic family in Spain, educated by Jesuits, and served at Mass daily, but became disillusioned with the Church around the age of sixteen; he famously quipped, \"I'm an atheist, thank God.\"[8](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/grasping-goodness) One reading of the film holds that Nazario, though disowned by the institutional Church, is the only true Christian in it.[8](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/grasping-goodness) Another analysis, using [Mikhail Bakhtin](https://www.edgepedia.org/mikhail-bakhtin)'s concept of profanation, argues that the film restores its protagonist's ordinary humanness and connection to material reality through carnivalesque profanations, and that Buñuel's strategies were informed by his experience as an emigrant in the United States and Mexico and by the Mexican amalgamation of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religious belief.[17](https://mail.jsa-asu.org/index.php/JSA/article/view/19)\n\n**The novel's theology.** A 2022 study of the novel argues that Galdós was not a dogmatic anticlerical: his heterodoxy targeted the imposition of doctrine by the [Catholic Church](https://www.edgepedia.org/catholic-church) on a believing people and the exercise of ministry by presbyters, and the contrast between the novel and liberation theology, the current that emerged in the 1960s, supports treating Galdós as a precursor of that current.[9](https://revpubli.unileon.es/index.php/LectSigno/article/view/7417)\n\n## Reception and legacy\n\nOn the festival circuit, critics embraced the film as a landmark achievement: it took the International Prize at Cannes in 1959 and cemented Buñuel's standing as a serious artist rather than a hack for hire of genre pictures. Some Catholic observers were tempted to embrace it as a devout film, which reportedly bemused Buñuel, an unrepentant unbeliever who had intended a critique.[6](https://sightlines.media/film/35124/nazarin-1959) It appears on the 1995 Vatican film list, one of the boldest inclusions given its atheist director.[7](https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/anti-clerical-cinema-nazarin-1959/) On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 86% Tomatometer from 14 reviews and a 90% audience score.[3](https://static.rottentomatoes.com/m/nazarin)\n\nThe film was restored by [The Film Foundation](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-film-foundation)'s World Cinema Project at L'Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, Televisa, the Cineteca Nacional, and Filmoteca de la UNAM.[18](https://moreliafilmfest.com/peliculas/nazarin) Its influence runs chiefly through Buñuel's own later career, shaping the collaborations with Julio Alejandro and with Francisco Rabal that carried into his late work.[6](https://sightlines.media/film/35124/nazarin-1959) A second-generation adaptation also exists: Arturo Ripstein's *El Evangelio de las maravillas* draws on Buñuel's *Nazarín*, itself based on Galdós's novel, relocating the story to a millenarian sect in [Michoacán](https://www.edgepedia.org/michoacan).[19](https://www.ledijournals.com/ojs/index.php/cuadernos/article/view/1799/1685)\n\n## References\n\n1. [Nazarín, Cinema Esencial](https://cinemaesencial.com/peliculas/nazarin)\n2. [Nazarín (1959), JustWatch](https://www.justwatch.com/es/pelicula/nazarin)\n3. [Nazarín, Rotten Tomatoes](https://static.rottentomatoes.com/m/nazarin)\n4. [Nazarin, Répertoire des films classés, Québec](https://repertoire.cinema.mcc.gouv.qc.ca/film/nazarin-3379/)\n5. [Nazarín, Catálogo de Películas ICAA](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=418650)\n6. [Nazarín (1959): analysis, influences and similar films, Sightlines](https://sightlines.media/film/35124/nazarin-1959)\n7. [Anti-clerical cinema: Nazarin (1959), Catholic Culture](https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/anti-clerical-cinema-nazarin-1959/)\n8. [Grasping at Goodness: Luis Buñuel's 'Nazarín', Commonweal](https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/grasping-goodness)\n9. [Hacia una nueva interpretación del anticlericalismo galdosiano: la modernidad de la figura del presbítero en «Nazarín» (1895), Lectura y Signo](https://revpubli.unileon.es/index.php/LectSigno/article/view/7417)\n10. [Nazarín: Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Morelia Film Festival catalog](https://moreliafilmfest.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/17-ficm-cat-todo.pdf)\n11. [Buñuel y la religión en las películas basadas en novelas de Galdós, Universidad de Zaragoza](https://zaguan.unizar.es/record/16486?ln=en)\n12. [La reinterpretación del texto en la pantalla: Nazarín de Benito Pérez Galdós en el imaginario de Luis Buñuel, CILH 47 (2021)](https://ruidera.uclm.es/bitstreams/caf7b6c7-f0a2-4eb5-99d5-777f3ddbfdda/download)\n13. [Subversive narrative and mexicanidad, National University of Ireland Galway](https://researchrepository.universityofgalway.ie/server/api/core/bitstreams/649a7ec8-204f-4b0d-ae6f-37e2f164f134/content)\n14. [La visión moral de Luis Buñuel en Nazarín: una emancipación de la novela galdosiana, PhilArchive](https://philarchive.org/archive/COULVM)\n15. [La reinterpretación del texto en la pantalla, Dialnet record](https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8221661)\n16. [Nazarín (Buñuel, 1958) – The (In)Effectiveness of Christian Justice?, The Other Journal](https://theotherjournal.com/2009/06/nazarin-bunuel-1958-the-ineffectiveness-of-christian-justice/)\n17. [Mexican Carnival: Profanations in Luis Buñuel's Films Nazarín and Simón del desierto, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas](https://mail.jsa-asu.org/index.php/JSA/article/view/19)\n18. [Nazarín, Morelia Film Festival](https://moreliafilmfest.com/peliculas/nazarin)\n19. [Galdós para una pandemia, Cuadernos AISPI 17 (2021)](https://www.ledijournals.com/ojs/index.php/cuadernos/article/view/1799/1685)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1950s*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Nazarín\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Nazarín](https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin](https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Nazarín\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/nazarin. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Nazarín is Luis Buñuel's Mexican black-and-white drama adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós's 1895 novel, starring Francisco Rabal as a quixotic priest; it won the International Prize at Cannes 1959 and appears on the 1995 Vatican film list." }