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. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)
Unpromised Land, Terre sans pain, Las Hurdes - Erde ohne Brot, Terra senza pane, Las Hurdes (Tierra sin pan), As Hurdes: Terra Sem Pão, 无粮的土地, Terra sem Pão, 無糧之地, Země bez chleba
Germany
Berlin International Film Festival
Spain
France
PortugalM/12
Spain
Brazil18
Germany
Brazil
France
Germany
Portugal
Spain
Bunuel didn't have three cameras to shoot that goat falling off the cliff- he had three goats.
Every year I watch this movie with a roomful of students and every year there's a palpable energy emanating from those who get and/or love and/or hate it, which is almost enough to keep the others off of their phones and engaged with the screen. The ones who are into it are *into it* -- I mean like staring a hole in the screen. Anyway, the case for Bunuel as the GOAT peaks, in my opinion, with this goat-infested masterpiece.
"Respetad los bienes ajenos"
A hypocrite genius, forever and ever, I will insist.
The auteur's excellently directed but clumsily written transition from Surrealism to Neorealism is a controversial mockumentary that not only raises consciousness regarding alarming life conditions, but also states a criticism against governmental authorities that advocates for the power of union during the times of the Spanish Civil War through the crude portrayal of a "God-forsaken" village.
The most fatal flaw this greatly shot and informative piece of work suffers is that of personal bias. A documentary must be impartial, always favoring both sides of the argument. It must take the responsibility of presenting the facts and their surrounding circumstances as they are, and leaving the task of…
The first film Bunuel made after his Surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dal, this is an ugly, dishonest "documentary" about a miserable corner in Spain and the equally wretched lives of the people who live there. Bunuel mocks both the viewers and his subjects in trying to offer a meta-critique of this form of filmmaking. If only he had opened his eyes.
Often mistaken for a genuine documentary, Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread is an amusing mockumentary that features all manner of tropes along with a deadpan narration, courtesy of Abel Jacquin. Shot in the mountainous regions of Las Hurdes, a remote part of northern Spain, the calmly communicated voice-over heaps disdain and condescension on to Buñuel’s grim images as though they are sincerely portraying an unfamiliar culture and society. Unsurprisingly, Land Without Bread elicited such an outcry in Spain that It was banned shortly after its premiere.
“Group of 10, 30 or 50 men, with only a blanket on their bags, empty hands empty stomachs mile after mile in this endless search for food.”
Here we have a documentary (or mockumentary, who knows...) directed by Luis Buñuel of one of the poorest parts of Spain, Las Hurdes, Cáceres, Extremadura, released in 1933. It’s an originally silent movie, but they managed to sound it in 1935, thanks to the money donated from the Spanish Embassy in Paris. This documentary was considered one of the best 12 documentaries ever made in the Mannheim Film Festival, in 1965.
During the 27 minutes, this short documentary tells how was the living in that part of Spain, how children and people died…
This is perhaps one of the more interesting films I've come across in some time, at any angle in which the word "interesting" could be used. Land Without Bread is an early effort by Luis Buñuel, where he sets out to accomplish... well, nobody really knows exactly. This confusion of the purpose of this short has created a conflicted discourse among Letterboxd users, where some think the film is an excellently crafted mockumentary while others are not so fond of it, calling it a strictly exploitative representation of poverty.
I think as far as picking sides goes in this battle, I have to choose the former argument in favor of the film. Why? Well, maybe I'm off base but Buñuel's…
Divorced from context, this is a baffling film. It’s a satirical documentary, I guess, but it’s unclear (to me, at least) whether Buñuel is mocking his subjects, the viewers, or documentary filmmaking itself, and the whole thing feels incredibly mean-spirited. I certainly appreciate the potential effort to complicate conversations around poverty and documentary culture, but I have no idea how to evaluate this project because I cannot discern if that’s what it’s trying to do, or what its purpose is at all.
Se a mentira é melhor do que a verdade, que se imprima a mentira.
Buñuel escolhe filmar o mito sob a forma do realismo. O interessante é que o autor conhecido pelo surrealismo nos provoca com a ideia de que o mito, a mentira, pode ser mais verdadeiro e potente do que a própria verdade.
Se a mentira é melhor do que a verdade, é porque tudo é narrativa.
It's just a matter of principle. You kill animals to stage scenes in a documentary, you're a cunt and I don't have any respect for your film.
This mockumentary is loved only because it's a..... Luis Buñuel™
"Unsympathetic critics made no bones about dismissing Buñuel's first two films as the products of a morbid mind. His third film, Las Hurdes (or Land Without Bread) is a classic rejoinder to such dismissals. Buñuel's film, a documentary, describes, matter-of-factly, a region of Spain so ravaged by endemic poverty that there our worst inner fantasies find their objective correlative. This morbid fantasy was created, not by a Surrealist unconscious, but by dear old Mother Nature, with the willing co-operation of a Christian tradition and the laws of supply and demand."
—Raymond Durgnat in Luis Buñuel
