Arturo Ripstein based this compelling family drama on a novel by Egyptian Nobel Prize–winner Naguib Mahfouz, but transposed the story of the interplay between hope and poverty to a Mexico of overwhelming social inequality. The mother, Ignacia, at once tender and cruel, knows that to survive in this world you must put up a false front of success and be willing to destroy others. The film relates the intertwined lives of the four children Ignacia has to support when her husband's death leaves the family destitute. Her survival strategy is to demand that three of the children sacrifice their own desires to put the fourth through college. But the family, instead of becoming the last redoubt of civilization, is revealed as the destroyer of dreams. With screenwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, Ripstein deconstructs Motherhood, the Family, Bourgeois Dreams, and even Mexican Melodrama with his highly artifical and distanced use of pathos.