Santa

Santa, a young woman living in quiet Chimalistac south of Mexico City, is taken in by the words of Marcelino, a soldier who comes to the town, and is abandoned. When her family and neighbours cast her out and send her away, Santa takes refuge in a brothel in the city and over the years becomes another woman there. A bullfighter treats her with contempt while Hipólito, the blind pianist of the house, holds a love for her he never tells her about. The film presents the woman’s fall not as a moral lesson but as the sum of what everyone did to her. Antonio Moreno’s eighty one minute Mexican film was adapted from Federico Gamboa’s novel, with music by Agustín Lara and Lupita Tovar as Santa. It was completed in 1932 and is counted as the first sound feature of Mexican cinema.