Following a night of raucous drinking, the filmmaker’s friend, Ramon Acin (Fernando Ramos), makes a deal: if he wins the lottery he’ll fund the project. He’s handed a book about a desperate region known as Las Hurdes, hidden in a land still trapped in the Middle Ages. Having recently broken with collaborator and friend Salvador Dali (who by then had become obsessed with selling himself commercially), Buñuel is left searching for the next project. Buñuel (voiced by Jorge Uson), then a head-strong young artist, stands in the back of a smoky theater watching an audience react in convulsions to his 1930 L’age d’Or, a surrealist reverie about love and repression with a dash of De Sade that sparked right-wing riots. Simo begins this story in the Paris of the early 30s when the world was still emerging from that cataclysmic wave of cultural transformation of which World War I was the detonator. Director Salvador Simo also understands something elemental about Surrealism as a movement: that it was not simply about trippy images but, perhaps more so, about the revolutionary transformation of life and the world.īuñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2019) I have to report, however, that this new animated feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, is till now the best dramatization of Buñuel’s early years, since it’s illustrated approach is free to imagine the master’s mind as a landscape of distorting dreams while still wisely interpreting the world around him. That, too, was a surreal experience in that Dali was interpreted no less by Robert Pattinson. The Spanish master has been conjured in numerous films about other people over the years, from his comic-light appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Little Ashes, an altogether not uninteresting drama about Buñuel’s broken friendship with Salvador Dali.

An animated movie by GKIDS Films about one of the great iconoclasts and rebels of the cinema is fittingly surreal when the subject in question is Luis Buñuel.

Luis buñuel my last sigh