Terra senza pane

I have been frustrated by the version of the film that is available in my area, entitled "Unpromised Land". The original "Tierra sin Pan" has a completely different commentary which is made "politically correct" in the "Unpromised" version. Avoid "Unpromised Land" as it censors and alters the original intent of the film as conceived by Bunuel!

...from Spain and provocative director Luis Bunuel. The people of the Las Hurdes region of Spain are shown in all of their starving and impoverished misery. Located roughly 60 miles from the well-off Province of Salamanca, Las Hurdes is rampant with disease and malnutrition. The camera captures the look of loss and hopelessness on the emaciated children's faces, and we see as they drink from a filthy river and eat meager portions of bread. This stuff is pretty raw, but there's a dispassionate distance courtesy of the matter-of-fact English-language narrator on the version I watched. There's also a couple of rough animal scenes (a goat falls down a cliff, and a donkey is killed by bees) that may be a deal breaker for some viewers. It is listed as one of the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die.

Bunuel had always been a visionary man,his cinema had never stopped trying from "un chien andalou" to "le fantôme de la liberté"."las Hurdes " was a documentary ,but it made the genre explode.And,to think it was seventy years ago!

Near the Portuguese border,there's a part of Spain where a doomed humanity used to live.The beginning of "las hurdes" deals with a feast in a village,last stop before the Hurdes country.

Then Bunuel begins his unthinkable depiction of this subhumanity:morons,maimed persons,monsters with twelve fingers,living in a filth you could not imagine.They drink in the brook/sewer!Springtime which everybody enjoys elsewhere is the worst season for the "Hurdes":all that remains for them to eat is cherries.But they cannot wait that they ripen,so they contract dysentery and they fall like flies.

And ,however,in a world that God seems to have completely forgotten,the children learn at school that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.And chiefly,they must respect the property of others(!). On the wall of the classroom,you can see a picture,showing an eighteen century marchioness!

Irony and surrealism are always here .After these horrors,out of the blue,Bunuel begins a lecture on the anopheles mosquito,complete with anatomical charts.

Banned by the Spanish government in 1933-1935,it took the Popular front(1936)to release what was the first social and political documentary.

I saw this movie with absolutely no idea what it would be about or when this movie was made, only that it was made by Luis Bunuel, and I felt I HAD to at least have seen 1 movie made by the man so many people see as one of the many movie gods.

I must add that before seeing Las Hurdes ("Land Without Bread") in the theatre where I saw it, they had programmed the documentary "Bunuel's Prisoners". In which the people of the Hurdes region comment on the movie and the circumstances under which this movie came to be. This movie gave me enough information to watch the main feature (Las Hurdes) with a much more realistic view than if I had seen this movie without seeing the doumentary first.

In the documentary several people express their annoyance and irritation with the manner in which Bunuel has twisted and fabricated some of the scenes in the actual movie/documentary. The goat falling from the cliff is not exactly falling per accident and the "dead" baby in one of the last scenes is not dead at all (this can be seen by watching the moving chest of the baby).

All in all I enjoyed this slightly fictional documentary very much and I recommend everybody to go see it. It will either make you laugh out loud at times and leave you deeply disturbed at other times.

A must for people who are not allergic to foreign movies from before WW2. 9/10

I have ancestors from my father side who are originally from Las Hurdes. The highlands were exactly like the documentary film portrays them. The lowlands slightly better off, The documentary helped them because the world focused on them and offered some help. Finally a cementery was built and food imported. Problem is the civil war that followed shortly afterwards. Buñuel was a surrealist film director who tried to shift towards realism after joining the communist party. The civil war against communists and fascists further increased poverty but no films were allowed for decades under the dictatorship 1936-1975