Thematically, Los Olvidados is similar to Buñuel's earlier Spanish film, Land Without Bread. Both films deal with the never-ending cycle of poverty and despair. Los Olvidados is especially interesting because although "Buñuel employed [...] elements of Italian neorealism", a concurrent movement across the Atlantic Ocean marked by "outdoor locations, nonprofessional actors, low budget productions, and a focus on the working classes", Los Olvidados is not a neorealist film (Fernandez, 42). "Neorealist reality is incomplete, conventional, and above all rational", Buñuel wrote in a 1953 essay titled "Poetry and Cinema". "The poetry, the mystery, all that completes and enlarges tangible reality is utterly lacking" (Sklar, 324). Los Olvidados contains such surrealistic shots as when "a boy throws an egg at the camera lens, where it shatters and drips" or a scene in which a boy has a dream in slow-motion (Sklar, 324). The surrealist dream sequence was actually shot in reverse and switched in post-production. Buñuel does not romanticize the characters, and even the abused blind man is revealed to have cruel habits of preying on children and selling fake elixirs. Film historian Carl J. Mora has said of Los olvidados that the director "visualized poverty in a radically different way from the traditional forms of Mexican melodrama. Buñuel's street children are not 'ennobled' by their desperate struggle for survival; they are in fact ruthless predators who are not better than their equally unromanticized victims".[10]
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