Hell city. The theater of Julio Castillo

Production: Eugenio Cobo

(DVD) Digital Library 4, Series: Stage creators 35’ 49’’
CONACULTA / INBA-CITRU
México, 2012

Complimentary, and at the same time independent from the documentary CD of Julio Castillo’s work Hell City is a film that gets inside the life and work of the Mexican stage director who managed to capture, after more than 40 stage productions, some of the most intense poetic moments in Mexican theatre. Characterized by a clear social concern and the imaginative turn of its scenes, this theater anticipated, with great pertinence, the forms of degradation of living in Mexico City and desperately searched for the redemption of a childhood condemned to live in the lowest stratus..

Eugenio Cobo’s documentary programme, based on writings of the very stage director and on an intense poem that Fernando de Ita dedicated to him a few days before his death, combines the images associated with those circumstances with images and fragments of Julio Castillo’s most significant theatrical undertakings, those which reflect an appropriate aesthetic of “the urban symphony of Mexico City in the second half of the 20th century”.