Portraying the isolated region of Las Hurdes, an inhospitable Spanish landscape inhabited by people without hope, Land without Bread serves to heighten the devastating imagery of human misery.
Premiered at the Press Palace in Madrid in 1933, the film was immediately banned by the Spanish Republican Government because of its “negativism”. It was later learned that Buñuel used editing tricks to dramatise several sequences and shots in order to rework the traditional documentary style.
This Buñuel’s personal “essay in human geography”, is an astonishing documentary that never leaves few people indifferent.
