Pan's Labyrinth (BFI Film Classics)

In this way, she is reborn in the Underworld Realm the way she wishes herself to be, in an ending that has been read as Ofelia’s self-sacrifice and ‘resurrection’ as a Jesus Christ figure.

For Pan’s myriad influences reinforce the film’s rejection of a unique version of truth, an imposed master-narrative incarnated by Vidal, and as such, any reductive or ‘final’ reading of the film is rendered obsolete – in a way, fascist.

GdT has stated many times that Pan, far from being the story of a girl dying, is instead the story of a girl who gives birth to herself as she wants to be.

GdT has acknowledged many times that the philosophy that has had the most influence on his work is the Jungian, almost psycho-magical conception of the world. I believe we see the world, and create the world we live in, in

‘the permeability of the membrane between reality and fantasy’.

Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, on 9 October 1964, GdT was raised mainly by his grandmother, a devout Catholic who literally exorcised him with holy water twice when he was growing up.

‘Fascism is above all a form of perversion of innocence, and thus of childhood. For me, Fascism represents in some ways the death of the soul.’87

a specific sphere of consciousness. You’re attuned to a certain wave, and my wave is in all the movies I make.

a goat with horns, but also the female fallopian tubes and ovaries.