Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
Buñuel's short pseudo-documentary is a genuinely singular work — a surrealist provocation masquerading as ethnographic reportage, using staged and manipulated footage to critique both the poverty of Las Hurdes and the documentary form itself. Its Novelty is unquestionable: it virtually invented the fake documentary as a political and aesthetic weapon, and nothing else quite sounds or feels like it. The Cinematography is competent and purposefully clinical, serving the ironic detachment Buñuel sought. The Plot, such as it is, follows a loosely structured tour through misery with some conceptual coherence. Acting is largely irrelevant in this context — the 'subjects' are non-actors used as ethnographic props, some moments clearly staged awkwardly. The Ending simply dissolves without meaningful resolution or formal payoff, a structural weakness even by the film's own anti-conventional standards.