| Overview: | A simple priest tries to live by Christian precepts in one of Luis Bunuel's best--and most unjustly neglected--films. "I am very much attached to Nazarin," said Bunuel. "He is a priest. He could as well be a hairdresser or a waiter. What interests me about him is that he stands by his ideas, that these ideas are unacceptable to society at large, and that after his adventures with prostitutes, thieves and so forth, they lead him to being irrevocably damned by the prevailing social order."
Nazarín (1958) is one of Buñuel's quartet of adaptations of the great 19th century Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, and, with Simon of the Desert (1965), though unfinished, forms the best of his explorations of religion.
The story, told in the manner of a Christian parable, is about a humble and unworldly priest who attempts to live by the precepts of Christianity, but is despised for his pains. The film was ambiguous enough to win the International Catholic Cinema Office Award - a supreme irony for the cinema's most famous anti-Catholic atheist - and also won the Grand Prix Internationale at the 1959 Cannes film festival. To this day the film remains on the Vatican's "50 Great Films" list.
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