Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 2018
Buuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
Buy Buuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'Buuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles' is a 2018 Spanish biographical animated film directed by Salvador Sim and with a screenplay written by Eligio R. Montero and Sim himself based on the graphic novel 'Buuel en el laberinto de las tortugas' by Fermn Sols, about film director Luis Buuel making the 1933 film 'Land Without Bread'. In August 2019, it was shortlisted as one of the three films in contention to be the Spanish entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, but lost to 'Pain and Glory'.
Plot
The controversy surrounding his first feature length film, 'L'Age d'Or', leaves director Luis Buuel unable to find new work. An anthropologist named Maurice Legendre hands Buuel an ethnographic study of the Las Hurdes region of Spain and asks if he would consider making a documentary of the region. Buuel's friend, sculptor Ramn Acn, buys a lottery ticket and promises to use the winnings to fund the film. Indeed, Ramn wins and keeps his promise. So Buuel assembles a film crew in the town of La Alberca.
From La Alberca, Buuel drives the crew to a monastery that doubles as a hostel. From the monastery, the crew explores the nearby villages. The villages consist of ramshackle box-shaped houses packed tightly. The winding streets between the houses make each village resemble a labyrinth, and Ramn notes that the jagged roofs resemble the scales on a turtle. The crew find themselves appalled by the poverty-stricken conditions of the homes. The plentifulness of their food supplies astonishes villagers. When they film a school, they find out that locals make most of their money getting government payments for taking in orphaned children, and the schoolchildren crowd around Buuel desperate for affection. Buuel later finds a little girl dying on the street, and feels helpless not having the medicine that would cure her.
Although the film is a documentary, Buuel stages many scenes for dramatic effect, in opposition to his crew. In La Alberca, Buuel makes Ramn hire a farmer to reenact the local tradition of ripping the head off of a rooster. Later on, Buuel wants to film the image of a mountain goat slipping and falling down a cliffside, but shoots a goat dead rather than wait for an accident to happen. Buuel also arranges for a donkey to get stung to death by bees, to use as a symbol for the suffering of the local people.
All through the shoot, Buuel is tormented by nightmares of his troubled childhood. One nightmare about his mother and the Virgin Mary compels him to dress in a nun's habit. When the sick girl finally dies, Buuel has a nightmare where he sees a friend from the region as Death. The nightmare inspires him to have the villagers reenact a funeral for an infant for the film.
By 1933, Buuel is back in Paris editing his film, 'Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan'. Notes at the end of this movie explain that days after the Nationalist coup in Spain, Ramn Acn and then his wife were executed for their Anarchist activity. Buuel is able to release his movie in Spain, but without Ramn's name. Movie notes explain that he was able to restore Ramon's name to the credits many years later.
Release
The world premiere was held at the 2018 Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles on October 20, 2018. It was released in cinemas in Spain on April 26, 2019.
Awards and nominations
Accolades
References
Buy Buuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles now from Amazon
<-- Return to movies from 2018