His melodramatic stories from the world of the socially déclassé, with its characters often scarred either physically or psychologically, can often seem morbid and drastic. Nonetheless they are largely distinguished by the beauty of their visual rendering which borders on the aestheticisation of those dark sides of the psyche that stimulate Arturo Ripstein. All of his films – which his life-long partner Paz Alicia Garciadiego has collaborated on as a screenwriter for many years – give a prominent role to sex in many likenesses as both a source and manifestation of human loneliness. The films of Arturo Ripstein, which will be presented in Karlovy Vary in the attendance of the director and his partner, are telling predications of the Mexican filmmaker’s view of the world as a grotesque theatre – a fact attested to by another quote: “I like to show what’s under the surface of morality, the eerie and the contemptible – I’m optimistic enough that I can expose it without going crazy.”