A bracingly frank depiction of poverty and the terrors of alienated youth, Buñuel’s breakthrough film follows a band of young boys captive to the cruel whims of their charismatic and dangerous leader, a violent teenager recently escaped from reform school. Buñuel forged a kind of raw neo-realism demanding a strikingly atypical cinematography from Gabriel Figueroa who eschewed the ennobling shadows of his work for Emilio Fernandez for a harsher kind of direct light, as glaring and unfiltered as Buñuel’s unsparing vision of urban and moral decay. Los olvidados deeply offended Mexican critics and audiences who punished the film with scathing reviews on its first release, calling it a deliberate affront to the Mexican nation and almost successfully burying Buñuel’s early masterpiece, until it was rescued by the efforts of poet and then cultural ambassador Octavio Paz who championed the film at Cannes where it would win Buñuel the prize for best director. A stingingly pessimistic work, Los olvidados reveals family and friendship to be viciously double-edged bonds that transform a warm maternal embrace into asphyxiating stranglehold, an outstretched familiar hand into a vicious fist.