Banned in Spain because of its "negativism," this portrait of the mountainous region of Las Hurdes captures a thoroughly inhospitable landscape and a people who long ago abandoned all hope. Reworking the traditional documentary to make this "essay in human geography," Buñuel deploys a highly objective, matter-of-fact commentary that serves only to heighten the devastating imagery of human misery and futility.

Sembene’s first film (aside from an unreleased documentary on the Songhay Empire, made for the government of Mali), Borom Sarret (“cart owner”) chronicles a day in the life of a beleaguered horse-cart driver in Dakar. In spite of the material limitations of the production—if not because of the challenges they posed—Borom Sarret manages to create a powerful social statement as it combines simple means with complex observations on bureaucracy, religion, and the anonymity of the modern city. Compressing his narrative into a mere nineteen minutes, Sembene conveys the condition of Senegal’s urban poor as he situates their experience in the larger social panorama of post-independence Africa.

The final episode in a compendium of Edgar Allan Poe stories entitled Histoires Extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead), Fellini’s Toby Dammit loosely adapts Poe’s macabre tale and transforms it into the story of a burnt-out British actor who arrives in Rome to star in the first Catholic western.