Land Without Bread

Director: Luis Buñuel
Year Released: 1933
Rating: 3.5

Buñuel's famous faux-documentary of the Las Hurdes region of Spain, with its inhabitants locked away from the rest of society, incredibly poor and terribly unlucky. The images are real, but it certainly is neither objective (Buñuel had two goats killed for this) nor is it entirely accurate - the Spanish Surrealist thinks nothing of showing you a sickly little girl, showing you the inside of her mouth, telling you she has an infection of the tonsils and then telling you she dies days later (whether this actually happened is unclear). The embellishments lend this an 'otherworldly' feel and also serve as a critique of the gross class inequalities a capitalist system produces, a running theme in his exceptional filmography.