44 Years Ago, a Legendary Writer Made a Disturbingly Prophetic Sci-Fi Movie That Still Resonates Tod

[Judi Lynn]

44 Years Ago, a Legendary Writer Made a Disturbingly Prophetic Sci-Fi Movie That Still Resonates Today

Story by Carlos Aguilar •
44m

Inside a crowded subway car, a man coughs loudly just before collapsing to the shock of his fellow passengers. Over the course of the next few months, many more people will die from a mysterious respiratory disease that seems to have emerged without warning.

That opening alone could trigger memories from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it’s the incisive social commentary that makes the 1979 film The Year of the Plague (El año de la peste) truly pertinent to our current reality. It plays like a cinematic prophecy.

Mexican master Felipe Cazals directed the ambitious ensemble piece from a screenplay co-written by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez (one of Latin America’s most lauded scribes), Juan Arturo Brennan, and José Agustín. Their clinical chronicle liberally transposes Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century novel A Journal of the Plague Year to the context of a modern developing nation.

As more casualties of this unknown infection land in the morgue, Dr. Pedro Sierra Genovés (Alejandro Parodi), a practitioner at an upscale hospital, develops a theory. He suspects that the illness, which is rapidly spreading across the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city, is the same that brutally decimated the world’s population over centuries: the merciless bubonic plague.

“Don’t tell me that the gringos invaded us?” Sierra Genovés’ wife asks when he suggests she and their daughters take precautions by boiling water and milk before drinking it. Her comment reflects the shadow of American interventionism in Latin America at the time, which had a hand in the violent incidents against Mexican students only a few years prior.

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