Lejos de los árboles

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.