A ruthless and unflinching account of life in the slums of Mexico City, Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados remains as powerful and disturbing fifty years on. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM revisits this underseen cinema classic.


LOS OLVIDADOS is one of those films that has been exploited and abused for too long. No doubt, if you’ve already seen this film on video, you’ve probably seen an appalling print due to the lack of copyright enforcement around the film. Los Olvidados is a film made during Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s exile to Mexico following his outrages during the 1920s and 30s. While you can easily put this into the worldwide neo-realist movement happening at the time, the film does not have the facile pleadings that typify most of that genre.

This can be attributed to the fact that Buñuel is one of cinema’s greatest analysers of human behaviour and contradictions. From Un Chien Andalou to Viridiana to Cet Obscur Objet du Désir, Buñuel exposes mankind through an unblinking camera, and certainly courted controversy. This is also a highly influential film in gaining respect for “Third World Cinema”. Although Buñuel was an established figure, he broke the mold of low-budget genre films that typified Latin American cinema.

Los Olvidados remains one of the director’s most disturbing and powerful works, mainly because it’s a pretty straightforward account of life in the slums of Mexico City (with the exception of excellently filmed dream sequences). The film looks at a number of street kids – but without the blinkered simplicity of most films. While he attacks a society which allows the kids to act like his characters do, he also shows these kids ruthlessly robbing a crippled old man (amongst other ill-treatment). He also then shows this poor crippled man to be a paedophile.

This ruthless telling of their life is free from any sort of sentimentality or romanticism. This is a cruel world where it’s certainly survival of the fittest. No mistaking that the title, which translates as “the forgotten ones”, is meant to be a pointed remark at how society’s treatment of these people’s behaviour is of collective, righteous outrage when it directly affects us, but how we forget them beforehand and afterwards. Buñuel is too politically astute to ascribe a political belief to this film – his portrayal of human nature won’t fill a Communist with much hope about human behaviour or please a right-winger with its suggestion that society itself is to blame. This is an undeniable masterpiece – one of the most powerful and brilliant indictments of a society ever filmed and is certainly a classic of cinema.