The Year of the Plague

The Year of the Plague

1979. Mexico. Directed by Felipe Cazals. Gabriel Garcia Márquez transposes the Great Plague of 1665 London to contemporary Mexico in this fascinating and virtually unknown retelling of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. “I've always been interested in plagues, beginning with Oedipus Rex,” Garcia Marquez later recalled. “A Journal of the Plague Year is one of my favorite books. Plagues are like imponderable dangers that surprise people. They seem to have a quality of destiny. It’s the phenomenon of death on a mass scale. What I find curious is that the great plagues have always produced great excesses. They make people want to live more. It's that almost metaphysical dimension that interests me.” Print courtesy of IMCINE. In Spanish; English subtitles. 109 min.