LAS HURDES/TERRE SANS PAIN

“Those graceless mountains fascinated me, as did the poverty and the intelligence of their inhabitants. I was amazed at their fierce attachment to this sterile country, this 'breadless' earth. In fact, fresh bread was just about unheard of, except when someone brought back a dried loaf from Andalusia,\" says Luis Buñuel in <![CDATA[<i>]]>The Last Sigh<![CDATA[</i>]]>. The budget for his first and only documentary, <![CDATA[<i>]]>Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread)<![CDATA[</i>]]>, ran out on the last day of the shoot. Marañon, a scholar and president of the governing council of Las Hurdes, did not grant the necessary authorization for distributing the film. \"Why do you want to show everyone all those ugly things? It's not that bad, you know. I've seen carts filled with wheat in Las Hurdes. Why don't you show something nice, like folk dances,\" said Marañon. Buñuel, of course, was less concerned with such \"trite expressions of misplaced nationalism\" than he was with exposing the squalor of a people ignored by a careless pre-Franco regime. Similarities to Alain Resnais' <filmlink id=\"xxx\">Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)</filmlink> are unavoidable: the sublime imagery, the methodical camera crawls and, most notably, its sardonic voiceover. With <![CDATA[<i>]]>Las Hurdes<![CDATA[</i>]]>, Buñuel was once more threatened by the Falange, an extreme nationalist political group founded by J. Primo de Rivera in 1933 and abolished in 1975 after Franco's death. Today, <![CDATA[<i>]]>Las Hurdes<![CDATA[</i>]]> is remembered less for its politicized images than it is for Buñuel parodic manipulation of documentary style. (Ed Gonzalez)

Will be screened together with <filmlink id=\"2601\">La fórmula secreta</filmlink>, <filmlink id=\"2603\">L.B.J.</filmlink> and <filmlink id=\"2602\">Liberté et patrie</filmlink>.