Alberto Gout's Aventurera
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Aventurera, Alberto Gout, 1950, digital projection, 101 mins
“From now on,” wrote a young François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma, “we must take note of Ninón Sevilla.” She is the star of this evening’s film. In Sevilla, he found an expressive vocabulary that was everywhere heightened. Her beauty, her wrath, her voice–for Truffaut they were like so many arrows whizzing past the sentries of Catholic propriety and middle-class mores. The critic J. Hoberman put it another way, dubbing her turn in Aventurera as “pure kinesis.” We revisit this movie now because, even though it’s widely regarded as a classic of Mexican cinema’s época de oro, and one of the finest examples of the rumberas film in particular, Aventurera has rarely been seen in New York cinemas since its last revival here in the 1990s.
As a genre, the rumberas film was distinctive, a hybrid set against the backdrop of urban nightlife and propelled by the rhythms of rumba. It drew together elements from a range of other forms: noir’s cynical outlook and shadowy style, the Hollywood musical’s costumed spectacles, and the melodrama’s focus on the travails of womanhood. Sevilla was its queen, the cabaret her court. In Aventurera she plays a young woman, ensconced in the comforts of the bourgeois family, whose life almost immediately unravels. Abandoned by her parents, she leaves Chihuahua for Juárez, only to encounter a string of horrible, handsy bosses. She finds comfort in the company of a rakish gangster, who proceeds to sell her to the madame of a nightclub-cum-brothel (the icily glamorous Andrea Palma). From these depths of sorrow and degradation, she ascends to stardom on the dance floor, and initiates a revenge saga as baroque and as pleasureful as any put to celluloid.
New restoration by Permanencia Voluntaria and Cinema Preservation Alliance from original camera negative, provided by Cineteca Nacional de México, with the support of the Academy Film Archive and Janus Films.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.