Review of Bless Me, Ultima (2017) by Carl Franklin

Abstract

Can faith in the Catholic church and belief in pagan magic coexist in the same culture and the same individual? It is this central question that the film Bless me, Ultima (2017), by the American director Carl Franklin, attempts to answer by adapting the homonymous novel by one of the exponents of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya. Franklin, like Anaya, exalts in a sublime way in Bless me, Ultima, the intercultural vocation of the people of El Puerto of 1944 who fear God and witches, and of a boy who, in his formation as a citizen and as a person, embraces in a spirit of multicultural hybridity the best of both worlds.