Editorial reading
When a city forgets its people on the street, cinema keeps their faces — a surrealist's eye on the roughest street.
When a city forgets its people on the street, cinema keeps their faces — the exile's eye, the archive of the forgotten.
The reading
In a Mexico City slum, two street boys are pushed by their fates onto the same street: one survives on theft and intimidation into a petty tyrant, the other finds no room between his mother's numbness and his brother's jealousy. Buñuel presses a surrealist's eye onto the roughest street reality — so even the dreams come back rough: dripping roast, a mother's face, a slap that never lands.
The film's cruellest stroke is the "school": it treats poverty as a moral defect to be corrected, and what the children learn there is only hierarchy and violence. Its failure is so perfectly reasonable — because society forgot them first, then punishes the consequences of having forgotten them. The title means "the forgotten ones", and seventy years on, that title still lives under the overpasses and bridges of every city.
Questions to sit with
Answer them yourself first, then open the reference answer.
Q1Why must the dream sequence — dripping roast, a mother's face — be surreal?
A reference answer
Because the psychology of poverty is itself surreal: hunger welds the mother's image to the image of food, love and fear sharing one face. Buñuel lets dreams invade so that people who have never hungered can feel that adhesion — it is not a metaphor but the actual psychic terrain of these children.
Q2The juvenile-correction scenes still cut today — is Buñuel criticising education, or society?
A reference answer
It is society; education is only its skin. The "school" treats poverty as a moral defect to be corrected, and what children learn there is only hierarchy and violence. The cruellest stroke is how reasonable the failure is: society forgot them first, then punishes the consequences of having forgotten them.
Q3Who are the "forgotten" on your city's streets? When did you last actually see them?
A reference answer
A hint: people under the overpass, cleaners in the small hours, delivery riders — the city runs on their being unseen. This film's training is not charity but sight: admitting their existence is part of our relationship with the city, not its background.