Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, which translates to The Forgotten, tells the story of a young boy named Pedro who is caught up in a life of crime in the festering slums of Mexico City. He is friends with a gang of ragamuffins, including the recently escaped Jaibo, but wants to go straight. He tries returning to his mother for help, but she doesn't believe he has good intentions. Still, he presses on, finding legitimate work at a blacksmith, and then at a carnival. But at every opportunity for success, Jaibo is there to pull the carpet out from under his legs and flip his life upside-down again.You feel for Pedro, you root him on, and you feel the pain he feels every time he bumps into Jaibo and things turn from bad to worse. It is gripping and depressing; it is not, as the intro tells us, optimistic. In fact, the intro tells us that there is no hope for the characters because there must be social change to cure the ills depicted in the film. But it failed to convince me of that premise because every obstacle Pedro encounters originates not from society as a whole, but from Jaibo as an individual.
The film is fairly mediocre on technical terms. The shots were conventional, the editing was shoddy, and the sound seemed perpetually off. Everything felt somewhat staged. The strength is in the film's quasi-surrealist images and ideas: a boy throwing an egg at a chicken to make it go away, a boy sucking milk straight from the udder of a donkey, a group of boys tossing mud and stones at a blind man. They are images that are difficult to ignore or forget. But they are images that hold power, value, and meaning. And they are images you should see.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042804/