Los golfos

Los golfos, Carlos Saura, Spain, 1959, 88’ OVES, DCP

The young Saura just returned in that time from the Instituto de Investigación y Experiencias Cinematográficas de Madrid and was looking for his own style. Buñuel was the shadow that gave shelter and the realism documentary was the direct influence, in his first short films as in his work as a photographer. But it is in Los Golfos, his first feature film, where he experiments everything he learned about the neorealist approach to the fiction. “This film was made entirely in natural settings”, says the banner that opens the film. And with non-professional actors, we could add, because the film contains the lives, dreams and frustrations of a young group from the suburbs of Madrid that go toe the center to commit crime. The Capitalist policy of economic development was something that nobody could define, although in the center people talk about imported cars, the money of the soccer, the first tourists and the success of the bullfighters. The outskirts were another thing: slum, misery, hunger. Six young people from the suburbs that scrape by as they can with assaults and robberies and dream with a better life. The portrait was recognized in the Cannes Festival where it was premiered in 1960 but the film couldn’t premiered in Spain until three years later because the censorship described it as “lack of interest”. The production is by Pere Portabella and the screenplay by Mario Camus and Daniel Sueiro. The result, an essential film and bridge between the most brutal Buñuel of Los Olvidados and the youth films of the late seventies. Therefore, prologue of the let-down quinqui.