Land Without Bread
| Las Hurdes | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Directed by | Luis Buñuel |
| Produced by |
Ramón Acín Luis Buñuel |
| Written by | Luis Buñuel Rafael Sánchez Ventura Pierre Unik |
| Starring |
Abel Jacquin Alexandre O'Neill |
| Music by |
Darius Milhaud Johannes Brahms |
| Cinematography | Eli Lotar |
| Edited by | Luis Buñuel |
|
Release date
|
December 1933 |
|
Running time
|
27 mins |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | French |
Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), (English language: Land Without Bread or Unpromised Land) is a 27-minute-long documentary film (ethnofiction) directed by Luis Buñuel and co-produced by Buñuel and Ramon Acin. The narration was written by Buñuel, Rafael Sanchez Ventura, and Pierre Unik, with cinematography by Eli Lotar.
The film focuses on the Las Hurdes region of Spain, the mountainous area around the town of La Alberca, and the intense poverty of its occupants, who were so backwards and isolated that bread was unknown. A main source of income for them was taking in orphan children, for whom they received a government subsidy. Buñuel, who made the film after reading the ethnographic study Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by Maurice Legendre, took a Surrealist approach to the notion of the anthropological expedition. The result was a travelogue in which the narrator’s extreme (indeed, exaggerated) descriptions of human misery of Las Hurdes contrasts with his flat and uninterested manner.
Buñuel claimed: "I was able to film Las Hurdes thanks to Ramon Acin, an anarchist from Huesca,...who one day at a cafe in Zaragoza told me, 'Luis, if I ever won the lottery, I would put up the money for you to make a film.' He won a hundred thousand pesetas...and gave me twenty thousand to make the film. With four thousand I bought a Fiat; Pierre Unik came, under contract from Vogue to write an article; and Eli Lotar arrived with a camera loaned by Marc Allegret."
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Wikipedia