LOS ANGELES – October 21, 2026 – The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego as the co-recipients of this year’s Career Achievement Award.
LAFCA’s awards honoring the year’s best achievements in filmmaking — including a new award, for Costume Design — will be decided by the membership on Sunday, December 6. Those winners will be honored alongside Ripstein and Garciadiego at the organization’s awards event, to be held Saturday, January 9, 2027, at The Biltmore Los Angeles.
“The films directed by Arturo Ripstein and written by Paz Alicia Garciadiego are daring, beautiful, and steadfastly unsentimental,” said LAFCA President Robert Abele. “They’re the essential creative pulse that kept Mexican cinema in a continuum of uncompromising greatness between the provocations of Luis Buñuel, a mentor of Ripstein’s, and the game-changing work his and Garciadiego’s films inspired from Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Carlos Reygadas, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu,” said LAFCA President Robert Abele. “Starting with the award-winning The Realm of Fortune and most recently in the unsettling psychodrama Devil Between the Legs, their collaboration is a rarity to be cherished, a vivid artistry built around the types of despairing, sordid lives that challenge our worldviews. Garciadiego’s novelistic, lyrical way with story and dialogue and the impossible-to-ignore humanity undergirding her husband’s attentive visual style have made for many theatrically compelling tales about the darker passions and eccentric humor churning inside their country’s outsiders. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association is very proud to be honoring these cinema giants together.”
Ripstein responded:
“Some awards are merited by the awardees, and some where the awardees are merited by the prize that they are bestowed upon. That is our case, and we are very honored.”
Wrote Garciadiego:
“It’s for me an honor and a great surprise to learn about this award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It’s an award I accept with delight and joy. It’s true that one doesn’t work to win awards. Nevertheless, when they do arrive, receiving them is an intimate pleasure.
“Cinema — writing for cinema in my case — is a long, arduous and often painful endeavor; it goes without saying that it’s also a solitary pursuit. I always imagine that somewhere in the world — I don’t know why I always imagine Ankara — and at some point in the not-too-distant future, there is an anonymous, lonely spectator to whom the film is dedicated.
“It’s a viewer who understands it, and who has been moved by it. That viewer is my responsibility; they have to understand and comprehend what I’m displaying on screen.
“Today, this lifetime achievement award given to us makes me feel that this viewer in the future, who is way over in distant Turkey, has replied to me.
“Thank you so much. I feel honored and flattered.”
Ripstein grew up around movies as the son of famous producer Alfredo Ripstein and a mentee of Buñuel. At 21 he made his feature directorial debut with the commanding Western-tinged tragedy Time to Die (1966), boasting a screenplay by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. From there, Ripstein’s independent-minded cinema embraced a hard-hitting fascination with outcasts trapped by desires and systems, as depicted in the chilling The Castle of Purity (1973) — an inspiration for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth — and The Place Without Limits (1978), which featured the first gay kiss in Mexican cinema history.
Ripstein met the Mexico City-born Garciadiego in 1985, when she was writing education programs for television, having begun her career as a teacher, and adapting literature into comic books. Their marriage has dovetailed with a professional partnership of 40 years, in which Garciadiego’s literary screenplays stimulate Ripstein’s directorial mastery of tone, visuals, and performance — “the voice of my eyes,” Ripstein called Garciadiego in a Los Angeles Times interview. The pairing has resulted in such acclaimed adaptations as The Realm of Fortune (1986), about a poor man’s rise and fall; The Beginning and the End (1993), chronicling a family’s collapse; and Bleak Street (2015), a stark, real-life murder story accurately titled. True crime being a prismatic mainstay in their oeuvre, the filmmakers reached another high point with their gripping retelling of the disturbing The Honeymoon Killers saga, Deep Crimson (1996), recently restored and given a coveted Criterion release.
About LAFCA:
Founded in 1975, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) is composed of Los Angeles-based professional film critics working in the Los Angeles print and electronic media. LAFCA members hold their annual awards vote, honoring screen excellence on both sides of the camera.
Aside from honoring each year’s outstanding cinematic achievements, LAFCA has also made it a point to look back and pay tribute to distinguished industry veterans with its annual Career Achievement Award, which is announced in October, as well as to look forward by spotlighting fresh, promising talent with its annual New Generation Award. In addition, over the past three decades, LAFCA has sponsored and hosted numerous film panels and events and donated funds to various Los Angeles film organizations, especially where film preservation was concerned. LAFCA members have also collectively been vocal about taking up causes they have felt passionate about, from drafting formal protests against censorship and colorization to lending their support to controversial films. For more information, please visit www.lafca.net.
For a full list of voting members, visit: http://www.lafca.net/members.html