Pan's Labyrinth

No solar term is attached to today. The pair fills two gaps that have stayed open in the archive: a Mexican director and a 1910s silent epic. Pan's Labyrinth covers the first gap - Guillermo del Toro sets his fable against Francoist Spain and writes a child's fantasy as another record of adult violence. Cabiria covers the second - a 1914 Italian silent epic, one of the earliest films in the archive, ninety-two years apart from its companion. Both place a child at the centre of vast orders: one completes three impossible tasks in the courtyard of a fascist officer, the other changes hands again and again amid the fires of the Second Punic War. Watched side by side, they show cinema doing the same thing from its birth into the twenty-first century: setting an individual fate under the weight of history, then finding the person again in the cracks.

1944 年，西班牙北部。Ofelia 十岁，随怀孕的母亲来到乡村，与维达尔上尉会合——继父是一名追捕反佛朗哥游击队的军官，家里的女仆 Mercedes 似乎藏着另一个身份。在屋后的古树下，Ofelia 发现一座废弃迷宫，里面等待她的是自称牧神的神秘生物：它说她是地下王国走失的公主莫安娜，要重获身份，必须在满月前完成三项任务。第一项任务是面对一只躲在树根下的巨蟾蜍；之后还有一本滴着血的书、一个装满了不该动的东西的箱子。现实那边，维达尔对俘虏的处置一次比一次狠，母亲也病得越来越重。两条线在同一座屋檐下推进，影片的后半段每一步都不宜提前说破。

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006 to a 22-minute standing ovation, widely reported as the longest of that edition. At the 79th Academy Awards it won Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography (Guillermo Navarro) and Best Makeup, with six nominations in all including Best Original Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Film (submitted by Mexico) and Best Original Score. BAFTA named it Best Film Not in the English Language, and it took the top Goya and Ariel prizes including Best Film and Best Director. Its Metacritic score of 98 made it the best-reviewed film of the 2000s decade, and the BBC placed it 17th among the twenty-first century's hundred greatest films. It is regarded as del Toro's magnum opus and a spiritual sequel to his 2001 The Devil's Backbone. Del Toro translated the English subtitles himself, unhappy with those of his earlier film, and Doug Jones plays both the faun and the Pale Man under five hours of facial makeup.