Wednesday, September 27----Magical realism meets gothic fairy tale in Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro's most ambitious film yet, PAN'S LABYRINTH, which has been chosen to close the 44th edition of the New York Film Festival .

The film mixes surrealistic fantasy with harsh reality in the tale of a young girl who travels with her mother and adoptive father to a rural area in northern Spain during the first years of the repressive Franco regime. To cope with the hardships of everyday life, the girl retreats into an imaginary world of her own creation. Through her fantasy life, which expresses the anxiety and dislocation of her real one, she discovers a way to come to terms with her environment in a fable of her own creation.

The film, written and directed by Del Toro, has been praised for its haunting quality and its sensitivity to the fears and anxieties of childhood. “With this film, Guillermo Del Toro has deftly combined his penchant for the fantastic, with a rich historical vision,