MovieChat Forums > Las Hurdes Discussion > What is real and what is not?

What is real and what is not?



While some parts are clearly fake (such as the goat "accidently" falling off the cliff), some other parts are quite hard to make out.

If most of those are lies, the village really existed and was really that poor? If It did, did Bunuel gave a 10-buck bill to most of these people to pretend most of the stuff that was "happening" there? Its actually quite disturbing to think that bunuel would play around with so much poverty and hunger.

Was him really trying to make political propaganda against mussolini/hitler.. Or was this project just a big laugh for Bunuel?

I'll point out some the stuff happening in this "documentary", and I'd like you guys to discuss if its real or not.

1. The "newly-wedded" party where the grooms have to cut the cocks heads off.

2. Amulets from Africa and Oceania.

3. The beautiful lady that lives by hereself with a priest on the sole building of a place (monastery/church)

4. The parents would take the bread from the Children

5. The womwn that looks 80 but the documentary says she is only 32 years old.

6. The girl lying by some rocks. The narrator says that they came back 3 days later and she was dead.

7. Goat falling off the rocks.

8. The hurdanos work on the hives, during winter.

9. Donkey being killed by bees.

10. Guy bit by a snake.

11. Hurdanos sleep on leaves that will later be fertilizer.

12. The guy trembling, suposedly had a fever.

13. A woman laid, looking dead, by the road.

14. (the mostly strange) The little dwarfs and "cretins" that are extremely violent and throw stones at people. Bunuel could only film them because they had an intermediary. One of them looked like a kid, but actually was 28 years old. Man, if Bunuel really made up all this, he's really sick!!! (and I dont know if that's a compliment or not).

15 (also pretty sick if not true) The dead baby that is carried away to be buried.

16 (hahahah, now that one would take the cake for creativeness) An old woman that roams the streets at night announcing deaths.

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This is the whole point of Las Hurdes, at least to me. It shows us the problems in such a realistic light that the realism starts to turn into surrealism. The reality seems like a surrealistic nightmare. I don't think we're supposed to think what was real and what wasn't - what we know is that all these things actually happen somewhere, in the poor countries, or at least things as horrible. It doesn't matter to me were the scenes in the actual film real or faked, because still they would happen at sometime, somewhere. That's what I thought :> Las Hurdes shows true cruelty. But I guess one could think about were they real or fake, but I guess it's pretty hard to say. Probably Bunuel didn't film an actual dead child being carried away? But that kind of stuff happen, children dying - of course.

"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle"

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