Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles

This is the true story of how Luis Buñuel made his third film . In this movie director Salvador Simó deals with Luis Buñuel from his stay at Paris to voyage to Las Hurdes to shoot a documentary short . As his friend the anarchist and sculptor Ramón Acin buys a lottery ticket and he promises to him to finance it . They are lucky and with the money won at lottery they go to Las Hurdes in 1933 . It is a remote region of Spain which was connected to the outside world only in 1922 with the completion of a road. To reach Las Hurdes, it is necessary to travel through the town of La Alberca, which itself has some unusual sights and customs. The residents of the area - spread across several villages - lives in poverty and in isolation from the outside world. They survive mostly on a diet of potatoes and beans with meat available only a few days a week. In fact, they eat goat meat only when one of the animals dies. Inbreeding results in a disproportionately large number of people with mental disabilities. The title of the black and white documentary that Buñuel shoots ¨Hurdes , Tierra sin pan¨ refers to the fact that the residents did not know how to make bread , and the Spanish title ¨Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas¨or ¨Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles¨ regarding the maze of the homes built in tortoise-style .

This is a cartoon movie portraying Luis Buñuel and his journey to the region of Las Hurdes to film a documentary , it has surrealistic events , including dreams and weird happenings , as well as self-biographic elements , as Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education by his rigid , stiff father , which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both subversive behavior and religion . The film also develops his childhood in Calanda with the famous ¨drums of Calanda¨ and the premiere of ¨L'Age D'or¨, after the film opened in Paris at Studio 28 on October, 1930, word spread about the film's bizarre content , on the evening of 3 December, 1930, halfway through the film, the fascist League of Patriots and other groups began to throw purple ink at the screen, they then rushed out into the lobby of the theater, slashing paintings by Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray , as producers soon withdrew the film from circulation and pulled the film from distribution for nearly 50 years and threatened with excommunication by the Pope . And the angry discusion between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí , as they had effectively fallen out by the time the film went into production to the extent that Dali refused to have anything to do with the actual making of the film , though they had previously made ¨Un perro Andaluz¨. In fact , Buñuel had financial help from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, when he made his first film , 17-minute runtime "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) , and subsequently ¨Age of Gold¨(1930) .

The picture ¨Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles¨ mingles animated frames along with documentary , and it is perfectly blended . The cartoon images are made in traditional style , an almost primitive and naif drawing , but is enough agreeable and charming . Narrating life at a remote region of Spain in Extremadura , where civilisation has barely developed, showing how the local peasants try to survive without even the most basic utilities and skills . The Hurdanos themselves live in several dozen villages in the nearby mountains, near a valley that contains the ruins of a convent . The lifestyle of the Hurdanos is so primitive that, until fairly recently, even bread was unknown to them. The film was well directed by Salvador Simó who formerly worked in animation department of various films, such as : Midsummer Dream , Goofy and son , Howl , Las tres mellizas , El Cid : the legend , It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown , among others