General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Nazarín

Nazarín is a 1959 Mexican black-and-white drama film directed by Luis Buñuel, adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós'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^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / source	Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro from Galdós's 1895 novel¹
Production	Producciones Barbachano (producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce); cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; music Rodolfo Halffter¹
Cast	Francisco Rabal (Father Nazario), Marga López (Beatriz), Rita Macedo (Andara), Ignacio López Tarso, Ofelia Guilmáin¹^•³
Format	Black and white, Spanish language, about 94 minutes⁴
Release	Premiered 11 May 1959 at the Cannes Film Festival; Spanish theatrical release 13 December 1968 with 109,904 spectators¹^•⁵
Honor	International Prize at Cannes 1959; included on the 1995 Vatican film list⁶^•⁷
Setting	Rural Mexico around 1900, during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz⁸

Spoilers

Plot

In 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

Rotten 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 The film ends with Nazario alone and stripped of all possessions, with little to validate the worthiness or reward of his mission.⁸

From novel to film

Galdós published Nazarín in 1895; its protagonist is the priest don Nazario Zaharín.⁹ Buñuel began shooting the adaptation in 1958.¹⁰ 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 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

Buñuel 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^•¹⁴ 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

Themes and interpretation

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 Buñuel himself glossed the trio of priest and followers as "There goes Don Quixote and his two Sanchos."¹⁶ 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

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 One reading of the film holds that Nazario, though disowned by the institutional Church, is the only true Christian in it.⁸ Another analysis, using 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

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 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

Reception and legacy

On 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 It appears on the 1995 Vatican film list, one of the boldest inclusions given its atheist director.⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 86% Tomatometer from 14 reviews and a 90% audience score.³

The film was restored by 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 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 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.¹⁹

References

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

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

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