There is no question that Luis Buñuel is one of the most important names in the pantheon of great filmmakers. Nominated for an award at the Venice International Film Festival, “Memoria de Los Los Olivadados” is a historical documentary by Javier Espada about the making of Luis Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” filmed on the streets of Mexico City in 1950. In “Memory of the Forgotten,” filmmaker and Buñuel scholar Javier Espada returns to the places where the landmark 1950 film was made, guided by a remarkable discovery: Nearly one thousand photographs Buñuel took while searching for locations, preserved for decades in an unassuming shoebox, along with Buñuel’s carefully written script notations. This documentary moves between cinema history and the city that gave Buñuel’s film its depth of understanding of lives of the poor and forgotten in the urban sprawl. The documentary screened on Tuesday and Thursday at the Regal Cinemas L.A. Live as part of the Hola Mexico Film Festival 2026, with a Q&A with director Javier Espada and a professor from UNAM.
Set in the slums of Mexico City, the film follows a group of destitute youths led an escaped juvenile prisoner named El Jaibo (played by Roberto Cobo). In the film, El Jaibo kills a boy named Julián (Javier Amézcua). He frames another boy, Pedro (Alonso Mejia) after stealing a knife from the shop where Pedro just began working. Pedro is trying to escape the cycle of poverty and crime in order to please his single mother (Estella Indo) who is struggling with her 4 young children. While Jaibo’s boy gang attempts to steal the money of an itinerant blind musician Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), they end up trying to beat him up but he is a tough old survivor. He gets some help from a boy from the countryside named Ojitos (Mario Ramirez) who Carmelo calls “Small Eyes”) to act as his guide person in the busy streets of the city. Pedro is arrested by the police on. charges of stealing the knife and Pedro’s mother agrees to have him sent to a juvenile work camp.
Buñuel combines gritty, documentary-style social realism with shocking surrealist dream sequences and Freudian symbolism. Especially interesting is the dream sequence of Pedro’s nightmare about his mother and the killer Jaibo which was brilliantly done of Buñuel’s cinematographer, the great DP Gabriel Figueroa. Through Arturo Ripstein’s unmistakable voice as narrator and conversations with Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michel Franco, Ofelia Medina, Elena Poniatowska, Juan Villoro, and many others, the documentary moves between cinema history and the city that gave the film its pulse. Along the way, it uncovers Goya’s influence on Buñuel’s imagery, explores the director’s experience as an exile in Mexico, and considers why a story created so long ago still feels painfully contemporary. I found the involvement of Arturo Ripstein especially interesting, as the film includes the importance of Roberto Cobo as its lead actor. Cobo was originally a dancer and there is an interview with Cobo’s niece who shares photos of Cobo’s long careers. Cobo later starred as la Manuela, the gay, cross-dressing son of the rich mayor who entertains as a flamenco dancer in Arturo Ripstein’s “El Lugar sin Limites” (“A Place Without Limits,” 1978). Cobo’s niece explains that Cobo was gay but that did not limit his career.
Buñuel’s films are known for their avant-garde surrealism which was also infused with political commentary. Often associated with the surrealist movement, Buñuel’s career spanned the 1920s through the 1970s. He collaborated with surrealist painter Salvador Dali on “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930). Both are considered masterpieces of surrealist cinema. With the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Buñuel emigrated to the United States in 1939. In his youth, growing up in Zaragoza, Spain, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at the age of 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth. In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, eventually majoring in philosophy. He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dali and poet Federico Garcia Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the three friends forming the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde, and becoming known as member of “La Generación de 27.”
Buñuel’s relationship with Dalí was somewhat more troubled, being tinged with jealousy over the growing intimacy between Dalí and Lorca and resentment over Dalí’s early success as an artist. The film “:L’Age d’Or” was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, while working on the scenario, the two had a falling out; Buñuel, who at the time had strong leftist sympathies,[47]desired a deliberate undermining of all bourgeois institutions, while Dalí, who eventually supported the Spanish fascist Francisco Franco. Later Buñuel decided to make a film focused on “peasant life” in “Las Hurdes,”, perhaps the poorest comarca in Extramadura, one of the poorest regions in Spain. The film, called “Las Hurdes:Tierra Sin Pan (1933) was banned by the Second Spanish Republic and then by the Francoist dictatorship. It is a film which continues to perplex viewers and resists easy categorization by film historians. “Las Hurde” has been called one of the first examples of mockumentary. and has been labeled a “surrealist documentary.”
Film director Javier Espada, who is a Buñuel expert, draws parallels between “Las Hurdes” and Buñuel’s 1950 film “Los Olvidados.” During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Buñuel placed himself at the disposal of the Republican government. The minister for foreign affairs sent him first to Geneva and then to Paris for two years (1936–38), with official responsibility for cataloging Republican propaganda films. In 1938, he and his family traveled to the United States and he attempted to work in the film industry in Hollywood.
While in New York City, Buñuel was introduced to Iris Barry, chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Buñuel stayed at MoMA to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) as part of a production team that gathered, reviewed and edited films intended as anti-fascist propaganda to be distributed in Latin America by American embassies. When questioned about his supposed Communist sympathies, he resigned and in 1944, he returned to Hollywood.
The Golden Age of Mexican cinema was peaking in the mid-to-late 1940s, at a time when movies represented Mexico’s third largest industry by 1947. Buñuel made “Gran Casino,” a musical period piece set in Tampico during the boom years of oil exploitation, starring two of the most popular entertainers in Latin America: Librertad Lamarque, an Argentine actress and singer, and Jorge Negrete, a Mexican singer and leading man in “charro” films. Two years later, he directed “El Gran Calavera,” based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, which proved to be a money-making success.
By 1949, his producer Óscar Dancigers pointed out that there was currently public interest in films about street urchins, so Buñuel scoured the back streets and slums of Mexico City in search of material, interviewing social workers about street gang warfare and murdered children. During his recent researches through the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel had read a newspaper account of a twelve-year-old boy’s body being found on a garbage dump, and this became the inspiration, and final scene, for the film, eventually called “Los Olvidados.”
The film tells the story of a street gang of children who terrorize their impoverished neighborhood, at one point brutalizing a blind man and at another assaulting a legless man who moves around on a dolly, which they toss down a hill. Film historian Carl J. Mora has said of” Los Olvidados” that the director “visualized poverty in a radically different way from the traditional forms of Mexican melodrama. Buñuel’s street children are not ‘ennobled’ by their desperate struggle for survival; they are in fact ruthless predators who are not better than their equally unromanticized victims.” The film was made quickly (18 days) and cheaply (450,000 pesos), with Buñuel’s fee being the equivalent of $2,000.
“Los Olivados” was in the theatre only 3 days before it was pulled. Many who attended the movie’s première in Mexico City on 9 November 1950, when ”Los Olvidados” was taken by many as an insult to Mexican sensibilities and to the Mexican nation . At one point, the audience shrieked in shock as one of the characters looked straight into the camera and hurled a rotten egg at it, leaving a gelatinous, opaque ooze on the lens for a few moments. Dancigers, panicked by what he feared would be a complete debacle, quickly commissioned an alternate “happy” ending to the film (which has been found in the UNAM archives) and also tacked on a preface showing stock footage of the skylines of New York City, London and Paris with voice-over commentary to the effect that behind the wealth of all the great cities of the world can be found poverty and malnourished children, and that Mexico City “that large modern city, is no exception.”
Through the efforts of future Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Octavio Paz, who at the time was in Mexico’s diplomatic service,”Los Olvidados” was chosen to represent Mexico at the Cannes Film Festival of 1951, and Paz promoted the film assiduously by distributing a supportive manifesto and parading outside the cinema with a placard. Opinion in general was enthusiastic, with the Surrealists (Breton and poet Jaques Prévert) and other artistic intellectuals (painter Marc Chagall and poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau) praised Buñuel’s film. Buñuel won the Best Director prize that year at Cannes, and also won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Award. The film was reissued in Mexico where it ran for two months to much greater acceptance and profit. “Los Olvidados” and its triumph at Cannes made Buñuel a celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world.
In 2003, “Los Olvidados” was inscribed as “the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities.”
Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain. In Mexico, he filmed 21 films over 18 years. For many critics, although there were occasional widely acknowledged masterpieces like “Los Olvidados” and “Él,” the majority of his output consisted of generic fare which was adapted to the norms of the national film industry, frequently adopting melodramatic conventions that appealed to local taste. In “Él” (1953), “Ensayo de un crimen” (“The Criminal Life of Archibaldo del la Cruz,” 1956), and “Abismos de Pasión” (1954), In other films, Buñuel investigated sexual pathology. He explored the destructive effects of rampant machismo, the disruptive status of women in a male-dominated culture, the blurring of fantasy and reality, and the absurdity of religious life. He wanted to make a film based on Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo,” and interested in making films based on José Donoso’s “Lugar sin limites” (“A Place Without Limits”), a film based on four stories of Carlos Fuentes’ “Aura” and Julio Cortázar’s “Las ménades.”
With this new documentary, Javier Espada shows years of research on the life and work of the filmmaker who went into exile in Mexico to contribute to the History of Cinema with his personal cinema and overcoming the limitations of the industry at the time. Luis Buñuel marked a major part of his personal and professional life, as a cinephile, as a researcher and of course as a filmmaker. He explained in the Q&A after the screening that his “personal connection with “Los Olvidados” began with the creation of the Buñuel Center of Calanda, a project for which he gathered a large number of photographs from many archives, from the personal archives kept by the family to those from various institutions, and among them, those related to this film stood out.” Javier Espada is known for his other documentary “Tras Nazarin: Following Nazarin” (2015).
