A spellbinding saga of sacrifice and bitter blood bonds, The Beginning and the End is an innovative adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz's eponymous novel that counts among the highest achievements of Ripstein and Garcíadiego's storied collaboration. The film’s multilayered portrait of a family's struggles after the death of the father traces the corrosive arc of the mother's blind devotion to her favorite son to whose education she pledges a dangerously blind devotion. Told in slowly sweeping, almost waltz-like, movements, Ripstein's restless camera sets the steady decay of the Botero family against the fascinating backdrop of a Mexico City teeming with sordid and strange details and minor characters whose vivid presence suggest a multitude of untold narratives. The Beginning and the End‘s pitiless vision of motherly love and familial pride as destructive forces can be read as an equally impassioned and ruminative counter to the deep tradition of family melodrama so central to Mexican cinema.