The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“One of the best films in the history of Mexican cinema. One of the films that changed my life.”

Guillermo del Toro

Buñuel returned to the pantheon of international cinema with Los olvidados, his first masterpiece made as an exile in Mexico. Mixing bleak social realism with a sardonic surrealist sensibility (not unlike his famed Land Without Bread), the director offers an unsentimental portrait of poverty and futility in the slums of Mexico City. The film focuses on the relationship between two juveniles: Jaibo, a hardened murderer, and Pedro, an innocent gradually corrupted by the cruelty of his environment. It was shot by the master cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (The Night of the Iguana) and, despite a hostile domestic reception, went on to win Best Director at Cannes. Today the film is regarded as one of Buñuel’s paramount works—Mexican cinema’s too, topping a 2020 poll by Somos magazine of the 100 best Mexican films of all time.

In Spanish with English subtitles

Restored DCP courtesy of The Film Foundation

“A film that lashes the mind like a red-hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity for rest.”

André Bazin

“The most horrifying of all films about juvenile crime … Buñuel, whose early work fascinated Freud, creates scenes that shock psychologically. Among them here is the mother-meat dream—perhaps the greatest of all movie dream sequences.”

Pauline Kael, The New Yorker