Unforgettable Buñuel
 

POSTED ON 12.10.2025

Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) holds a place in history as one of the cornerstones of cinema. This documentary retraces its creation.

© DR
Los Olvidados/The Young and the Damned (1950)

THE SUBJECT: Buñuel specialist Javier Espada discusses the scandal caused by the film's release in Mexico before its success at Cannes led the authorities – and the public – to reassess their judgement of a work that has since been inscribed in the Memory of the World list by UNESCO.

THE METHOD: The documentarist visited the filming locations, as well as Spain to meet with researchers, technicians, film preservation experts and filmmakers, including Alejandro Iñárritu, who details the universal significance of the ‘Forgotten’ with extracts to illustrate his point.

BONUS: Buñuel often wondered what his life would have been like if he’d been one of those children who collected manure as his father's wagon passed by. ‘What would my memories be?’ This sense of compassion inspired him to direct Land Without Bread in 1933, a raw account of rural poverty in Spain; a radical œuvre, somewhere between documentary and fiction. Los Olvidados became its ‘Mexican transposition’, as Espada demonstrates. We learn that Buñuel spent two years scouting locations, getting involved with the population to soak up the urban environment, even choosing his characters on the street, some of whom evoke Goya's dark period, we discover. The film was ejected from the theatre after three days, and the filmmaker risked deportation, until the Cannes accolades allowed it to make a triumphant return to cinemas. The story of the 2000 discovery of a reel containing the film’s unused ‘happy’ ending is a genuine delight—just like the final reveal during the credits about where his ashes were scattered, the man who described himself as ‘an atheist, thank God’.

Carlos Gomez 

Memory of the Forgotten by Javier Espada (Memoria de Los Olvidados, 2025, 1h42)
Institut Lumière (Villa) Sun12 4.15pm