tierra sin pan (d. buñuel)

Buñuel’s early short film is a trip to a desolate corner of early 20th Spain, Las Hurdes, a mountainous region not that far from the Portuguese border. The film reveals a society steeped in poverty, which doesn’t look as though it has changed much since the Middle Ages or before. Children and adults go barefoot, the diet is impoverished, with the voiceover informing that very little grows in this region. The men go to seek work elsewhere, leaving the women to keep the villages alive. In a highly Buñuelesque touch, the film shows a donkey which has been attacked by bees and is on its last legs. At another point we are shown a sick baby and informed that it subsequently died three days after the filming. Coffins have to be carried across rivers, because the soil is too stony to dig. Everything is precarious and the similarities between standards of living in poorer areas of Latin America and Spain seem striking. Having said which I passed through Caceres, the nearest town, a few years ago, and the changes were remarkable: this is a society that has succeeded in more or less eliminating poverty, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the rural communities which Buñuel reveals in this 90 year old film.