Watch Land Without Bread For Free

Takes itself way too seriously

Redundant and unnecessary.

I wanted to but couldn't!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Unsettling and confusing, primarily because of the stilted narrative. Since it's Buñuel, you should know better than to take it at face value. The tip-off comes early, in the odd phrase, "the expedition meets a choir of idiots," with no choir of any kind visible and a jump cut to another scene. Throughout the film, as the pompous voice drones on, odd things continue. We look into the mouth of a girl reported to be dying of inflamed gums; it looks healthy enough. We are shown impeccably groomed children and told they are dressed in filthy rags. By the time we are shown a child and told, "This man is 28 years old," it's become obvious that some serious leg-pulling is going on. Yet it's all set in an unfaked location known for its extreme poverty. Naturally, Buñuel never wastes an opportunity to aim his deadly sniper fire at the Catholic church and other purveyors of an inequitable system that ensures that the peasants of Las Hurdes will remain securely malnourished and undereducated. It's got to be one of the strangest exploitation pictures ever made, which is of course a big part of the point.Read the full review at Cinema 1001. This movie is #77 in the Schneider list of 1001 Movies.

I found it very interesting reading the reactions of others here, from interpreting this as everything from a pure comedy to a pure documentary. The truth is that it denies classification, and for many that just simply does not compute. Therefore, it has obviously done exactly what Bunuel wanted.The aim of surrealism is to lure you in with the trap of a conventional narrative, and then hit you right in the face with something impossible to just passively accept. This film is the perfect example of this. You are absolutely forced into the role of active observer; forced to draw your own conclusions. Independent thought is pulled to the surface, returning comprehension to it's original purity. Reality lies not in what you are seeing, and not in what you are hearing, but somewhere in-between.My God, this man was a genius, and so far ahead of his time it's unbelievable. Spielberg shows you what you want to see. Bunuel shows you what you need to see. Find this film and see it. Its value is incalculable.

"Las Hurdes" may be the Surrealist documentary par excellence, a tendentious film discourse about poverty shot in Las Hurdes Altas, a human settlement out of a nightmare, among steep precipices, in an almost deserted landscape. Even based on Maurice Legendre's 1927 anthropological text "Las Jurdes: A Study of Human Geography", Buñuel forced into the harsh situations his own obsessions with insects and donkeys that would appall today any society for the protection of animals. Done at a time when Spain was among the nine countries with the highest level of economic development, by contrast this work shows the state of misery of a community marginalized by landowners, forgotten by authorities, and living in the cruelest of conditions. The cynic commentary makes the facts more striking, but the music score by Darius Milhaud is an obtrusive element. Although banned by the authorities, it was re-released with a Spanish narration read by actor Francisco Rabal.

This is a fascinating documentary from Luis Bunuel about a little known people called the Hurdanos, who live primitive miserable lives in a remote region of Spain. Its hard to imagine that even in the early 20th century when this film was made, there were still people living in "civilized" Europe under the conditions shown in this film. Only a few years before this film was made did these people know of bread. They have only rudimentary farming skills. The narrator states that at no time did the film crew hear anyone sing or play music, so perhaps music is unknown to them. Malnutrition, pestilence, genetic disorders from inbreeding, and lack of proper hygiene plague these poor wretched people. This film shows them dying off in such high numbers, that one has wonder why these people didn't all die off or migrate to more hospitable terrain long ago.Like so many other documentaries, some scenes were obviously staged for the camera, like the now notorious donkey falling off a cliff. We see the donkey falling in several different shots taken from different angles, which makes it unlikely the cameramen just happened to be there when the donkey fell. Some people claim this film is an attack on Franco, but Franco didn't come to power until 1936. Actually I don't think this film was trying attack anyone. It merely does what I think its makers set out to do; try to capture the lives of a people who are very different from the rest of us.