Bleak Street

Two older women work as sex workers in Mexico City and struggle to get by. At a hotel they meet two wrestlers of small stature. What they mean to do is drug the men and rob them. The dose of drops they give is too strong and the two men die. The deaths were not intended, but that does not change the outcome. The film tells the matter not as a murder story but as a consequence of poverty and of ageing. The women’s lives, their homes and the world around them are the real body of the account. The story sets out from something that really happened in Mexico City in 2009. The film is shot in black and white. Patricia Reyes Spíndola and Nora Velázquez appear in Arturo Ripstein’s ninety nine minute Mexican film, completed in 2015.