In its Bay Area premiere, Gieling’s The Prisoners of Buñuel takes us back to Las Hurdes, the isolated region of Spain where Luis Buñuel shot his controversial documentary Land Without Bread in 1932. Banned in Republican Spain, censored in Britain and used as an anti-Fascist propaganda tool in France, Buñuel’s film has been subject to various readings. Gieling’s projection of the film in a local village square in 1999 elicits the inhabitants’ reactions both to the film and to the perceived depiction of their region as a kind of hell on earth, encouraging us to consider the political and moral implications of representational practices. The documentary will be accompanied by Buñuel and Dali’s first surrealist short ‘the still-shocking Un Chien Andalou‘ and the American voiceover version of Land Without Bread. (Irina Leimbacher)