Documentary
Spanish (Las Hurdes)
1933 · Directed by Luis Buñuel · 30 min
In 1932 Luis Buñuel took a small crew to Las Hurdes, a remote, impoverished mountain region of western Spain, and made a short documentary about how its people lived. A calm, official-sounding narrator guides the viewer through villages, fields and hardship, and the tone is odder than it first appears.
Why it matters in cinema history
A key work of 1930s Spanish and surrealist-influenced cinema, it is often cited as an early example of a documentary that questions its own authority and method.
Watch with intention
Listen to the narrator as one voice among several, and keep asking what the images are doing alongside him.
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