Los Olvidados

The winner of two Cannes Film Festival awards, Luis Buuel's Los Olvidados (aka The Forgotten Ones and The Young and the Damned) was the director's first international box-office success. Yet Buuel showed no signs of curbing the outrageous iconoclasm that made him famous in Europe and South America; one of the more lasting images of the film is the clash-of-cultures shot of a glistening new skyscraper rising above the squalid slums of Mexico City.

The best known film of Buñuel's Mexican period, LOS OLVIDADOS looks unflinchingly at life in a Mexican slum. At the center of the story are Pedro, a young boy who is walking the line between delinquency and responsibility, and Jaibo, an older, charismatic boy who has already chosen the former path. Jaibo exerts his influence over almost every boy in the village, and when he accidentally murders the only good role model Pedro has and sleeps with Pedro's mother, it seems the path Pedro is to take has already determined itself. Full of offbeat images and symbolism, Buñuel mixes realism and surrealism in what became something of a trademark style for him, but the only other film Buñuel did that compares to the realism in this film is his documentary LAND WITHOUT BREAD. Like the Italian neo-realists, Buñuel used mostly non-professional actors and shot entirely on location. Constricted by a tight budget, Buñuel was not able to include a couple of surreal sequences he had originally conceived, but this is still one of Buñuel's most powerful films. Features the famous dream sequence where Pedro's mother floats after him with a raw piece of meat.

Este es otro de los álbumes autoconclusivos de la serie Leyendas de Hoy. Relatos en los cuales se examinan temas cotidianos brindándoles un toque más o menos fantástico, como en este caso, donde un pueblo perdido en el norte de Francia padece las consecuencias del progreso y la militarización de la región.

A group of juvenile delinquents live a violent and crime-filled life in the festering slums of Mexico City, and the morals of young Pedro are gradually corrupted and destroyed by the others…