Synopsis
In director Gus Van den Berghe’s cinematic translation of 17th century poet Joost van den Vondel’s Lucifer (1954), the fallen angel climbs down a celestial ladder and miraculously arrives in a rural Mexican village. Plagued by their stagnant ways of life, Lucifer works his magic in physical form, aiding the villages and brightening up the atmosphere into a celebration followed by tragedy. Shot in ‘Tondoscope’, a newly invented circular aspect ratio, Lucifer has a cosmological veneer of an age-old fable set in a contemporary setting. As with all great revisionist depictions of biblical mythology, the film skirts through any hint of blasphemy to pose a compelling new perspective into the devil himself as the bearer of consciousness that binds humans to their freedom.