Land Without Bread

1933 film

Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (English: Land Without Bread or Unpromised Land) is a 1933 French language Spanish pseudo documentary (ethnofiction) directed by Luis Buñuel and co produced by Buñuel and Ramón Acin. The narration was written by Buñuel, es, 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 es, 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.

The premiere took place in December 1932 at Madrid's Palacio de la Prensa. The entire intellectual cream of the Spanish capital was invited to a semi private show. Land Without Bread provoked such an uproar in Spain that conservative forces banned the distribution of the image throughout the country. The official reason for the censorship record was "defamation of the good name of the Spanish people." In modern times, critical reception for Land Without Bread has been mostly positive. Ed Gonzalez from Slant Magazine, for example, awarded the film 4 out of 4 stars, writing, "Las Hurdes becomes a frightening call to arms, a fabulous open text that resists simple readings and questions humanity's notion of progress." Jeffrey Ruoff called it a "revolutionary film." Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is a 2018 Spanish Dutch animated film based on the graphic novel Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas by Fermín Solís. It covers how Buñuel and his crew filmed at Las Hurdes.