The Making Of: Arturo Ripstein on El lugar sin límites (Part I of II)

The screenplay of El lugar sin límites was written collaboratively by Arturo Ripstein, José Emilio Pacheco, and Manuel Puig, and is adapted from the novel of the same name by José Donoso. Puig—best known for El beso de la mujer araña—brings to the script a literary sensibility attuned to melodrama, queer desire, and confinement, while Pacheco’s prose sharpens the film’s political and ethical tensions. This layered authorship situates the film at the intersection of Latin American literary modernism and Mexican cinematic melodrama, shaping La Manuela’s emergence as a complex, mediated figure rather than a purely symbolic one.

In reflecting on the making of El lugar sin límites, Arturo Ripstein emphasizes that the film emerged from a convergence of contingencies rather than from a stable or inevitable production path. The project began with the manuscript of José Donoso’s novel, which at one point was slated to be adapted by Luis Buñuel—the Spanish filmmaker whose international reputation by the 1960s and 70s had already secured his place as a central figure in modern cinema. Buñuel ultimately chose not to direct the adaptation, a decision that left the project suspended until Ripstein took it up under markedly different conditions.

Following the poor critical reception of Foxtrot, Arturo Ripstein was marginalized within the Mexican film industry. At the time, filmmaking in Mexico depended heavily on the backing of productoras—powerful production houses that controlled financing, access to equipment, shooting schedules, and distribution. After Foxtrot, Ripstein was pushed to the periphery of this system: assigned inferior equipment, limited resources, and marginal filming conditions. This industrial relegation shaped the material aesthetics of his subsequent work, forcing a cinema made under constraint—static camera, enclosed spaces, and minimal spectacle—that would become central to the bleak, claustrophobic world of El lugar sin límites. Rather than an artistic choice alone, this austerity was the result of institutional exclusion within a tightly controlled production economy.

Ripstein suggests, is inseparable from the film’s historical singularity: El lugar sin límites would become one of the first Mexican films to place a transfeminine character like La Manuela at its center. "El lugar sin límites se film en situaciones precarias", he says. Yet this emergence occurred under severe material and institutional constraints. Ripstein describes a production environment shaped by cultural politics that deprioritized projects deemed morally or socially risky: limited funding, lack of technical resources, and restricted access to equipment all conditioned what could be filmed and how. The producer’s insistence on casting alternative actors further underscores the instability of the project, as commercial viability repeatedly came into tension with representational risk.

Crucially, Ripstein points to the role of homophobia and transphobia in shaping casting decisions. Well-known actors—most notably Resortes—declined the role of Manuela, reportedly fearing the impact such a character might have on their careers. This refusal exposes the operation of the Mexican sex/gender system at the level of the film industry itself: embodying a transfeminine character was perceived not merely as acting, but as a reputational threat capable of destabilizing masculine legibility off-screen. Manuela’s eventual appearance, then, is not only a narrative rupture but an industrial one—made possible through a series of refusals, compromises, and exclusions that reveal how transfeminine visibility entered Mexican cinema only under conditions of precarity, mediation, and risk.