The Escuela de Barcelona never made a secret of its debt to Surrealism in general and Luis Buñuel in particular. So it's not too surprising that one of its earliest feature-length masterpieces pays hand-on homage to the master with a modern, cinema-vérité-rooted version of his greatest non-fiction piece: Land Without Bread (1933).
Spain is still essentially poor-cum-backwards, and still likes to define itself through rural rituals of sometimes tremendous cruelty (WARNING: donkey lovers look away now!). And yet, in its own particular way, Far From the Trees is a melancholic monument to a vanishing world - whose terrors and horrors stem from a sociopolitical condition that the then-current government did as little to change as any earlier one (save the Republic, maybe), and none has since.
- Director
- Jacinto Esteva Grewe
- Country of production
- Spain
- Year
- 1972
- Festival Edition
- IFFR 2016
- Length
- 100'
- Medium
- 35mm
- International title
- Far from the Trees
- Language
- Spanish
- Producer
- Francisco Ruiz Camps
- Production Company
- Filmscontacto
- Sales
- Filmoteca de Catalunya
- Screenplay
- Jacinto Esteva Grewe
- Cinematography
- Juan Amorós, Juan Julio Baena, Luis Cuadrado, Fracisco Marín, Milton Stefani
- Editor
- Juan Luis Oliver, Ramon Quadreny
- Music
- Johnny Galvao, Carlos Maleras, Marco Rossi