Should you watch Land Without Bread?
Who it’s good for, who it isn’t, and what’s in it. No ratings, no scores.
Land Without Bread
Documentary · 1933
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.
The sides of Land Without Bread
- Villages of Las Hurdes in 1932
- Luis Buñuel behind the camera
- Poverty filmed with a cold narrator
Land Without Bread is good for you if…
- you like Buñuel turning a documentary into something strange.
- you can take a film about misery with no comfort offered.
- you want to see rural Spain before the civil war.
Land Without Bread is bad for you if…
- you can't watch sick children and animals dying on screen.
- you can't take a narrator's dry irony over real people's suffering.
- you find films from the 1930s dated.
About: poverty · isolation · the gaze of outsiders
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