Los Olvidados (1950)

Director: Luis Buñuel
Country: Mexico

I remember seeing this one for the first time on sunday at my grandmother's when I was a child, and what a brutal, realistic and powerful experience I had. Portraying the darkest side of Mexico City and its people, especially the most fragile and unprotected: the young ones, Buñuel created possibly the best Mexican movie ever. 

As a child, the main character of "El Jaibo", performed by Roberto Cobos, scared the hell out of me, he is more than a bully in the film, he's one of the most cruel young delinquent psychopaths I ever seen on the screen, along with other evil characters such as Pedro's mother "Marta" a cruel-careless mother who rejects his own child (the Mexican audience was shocked because of that fact, alleging that Mexican mothers were sweet and protective) and "Don Carmelo" the blind man who reaveals himself as a child molester . 

Despite the fact of the "realism" of the film, Buñuel made some surrealist and brilliant sequences, not to mention, the director of photography was the legendary Gabriel Figueroa. Los Olvidados is a universal classic film whose impact can be seen in many other works, for example in Mathieu Kassovitz's "La Haine", Fernando Meirelles' "Cidade de Deus" or in the films of the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. Buñuel not only portrayed the forgotten ones from Mexico City, but also from other places too, and stills depicting the current situation in many suburbs of the big cities around the world, including Mexico...