Film-maker Luis Buñuel’s surreal journey to a deprived region of
Spain in the 30s is recreated in a gently engaging animation
Here is an engaging if somewhat demure animation, bordering occasionally on a kind of gentle sentimentality that is inimical to the subject: it’s about the great director Luis Buñuel, though I suspect it’s more inspired by Pedro Almódovar.
Based on a graphic novel by Spanish artist Fermín Solís, this imaginatively reconstructs a great moment in Buñuel’s life. In 1933, as surrealism was considered by many artists an essential riposte to the bourgeois conformity that was enabling fascism, Buñuel boldly began work on a new film, entitled Land Without Bread – a supposed documentary about the desperately poor region of Las Hurdes in western Spain, whose wretchedness was blandly ignored by the central government.