Pan's Labyrinth (BFI Film Classics)

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.

saying: ‘To obey – just like that – for obedience’s sake … without questioning … . That’s something only people like you do.’

The thing is, in my own experience, every week, every day, I find that when you are obeying, I generally think you are doing the wrong thing. If you find there are two options, one difficult and one easy, 99 per cent of the time the hard choice is the good choice in my opinion.

‘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

‘Pan is a game of interpretation where the reward for repeated viewings is not the addition, but the multiplication of meanings.’30

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

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.

story’. The movie is about two or three things; disobedience, choice and memory.

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.