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MEMORY OF THE FORGOTTEN, a Documentary

Rafael Aviña

On September 5th, 1949, months before the shooting of The Young and the Damned, Luis Buñuel wrote a letter to his friend José Rubia Barcia: "A month ago, I finished a film that was foreseen to become a high-grossing film (it’s worth nothing but it’s decent)—The Great Madcap— (...) The film I’m working on excites me, and if it turns out well, you’ll hear about it. It centers on juvenile delinquency. I have researched two hundred cases from the Juvenile Court and a hundred files from the Clínica de la Conducta, a psychiatric institution in Mexico. The characters are Lumpenproletariat teenagers from Mexico City. The treatment of the film is a compromise between documentary and fiction, necessary for the film to be commercial. I make no moral or artistic compromises…"

To lend greater realism to his work, Buñuel went incognito, wearing worn clothing. He clandestinely walked through the streets of lost cities, rode streetcars and buses, and mingled with people in the city's poorest and most working-class neighborhoods, such as Nonoalco and La Romita, located between Colonia Doctores and La Roma, among others. The director struck up conversations with adults and, especially, with children and teenagers as he began outlining what would become The Young and the Damned in collaboration with his screenwriter, Luis Alcoriza. Later, Pedro de Urdimalas “Mexicanized” the dialogue, though he chose to forgo credit on the film.

The animosity toward The Young and the Damned was evident even before its original release on Thursday, November 9th, 1950, at the México Theater, where it ran for only one week with a C rating: adults only. The on-set hairdresser quit after witnessing the scene in which the mother denies her son, Pedro, food. “That's denigrating. I don't want to make this film,” she said, leaving the studio and submitting her resignation. They were forced to hire someone else. Some crew members grumbled at certain scenes: “Mr. Buñuel, this is tremendously filthy. Not all of Mexico is like this. We also have beautiful residential neighborhoods like Las Lomas," Buñuel recalled in an interview with José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent. 

President Miguel Alemán considered it an unpleasant film that was, of course, the antithesis of what he sought to project as the modernity and prosperity of his regime. Buñuel, in turn, recalled that during those days he ran into an indignant Jorge Negrete in the cafeteria at Estudios Churubusco, who told him, “If I had been in Mexico at that time, you never would have made that film…”

Several of these anecdotes can be found in the documentary Memory of the Forgotten (Spain-Mexico-United States, 2025), directed by Javier Espada. This project took at least two years of research and interviews, and after being presented at the Venice International Film Festival and the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), it arrives at DocsMx on October 24th (Cineteca Nacional) and October 25th (Centro Cultural de España).

Espada, born in Calanda—Buñuel's own homeland—has specialized in the filmmaker's work, as evidenced by his previous projects: The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel, Tras Nazarin: Following Nazarin, Generación: Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel: A Surrealist Filmmaker. On this occasion, he returns to Buñuel's Mexican masterpiece: The Young and the Damned (1950), exploring its controversial production, the hatred and rejection it generated in Mexico, and the film’s enduring significance and relevance.

Among the documentary's contributions is Javier Espada’s exploration of the influence he finds in The Young and the Damned from the pictorial work of painter Francisco de Goya and his marginal, terrifying characters, such as the blind man, whom he compares to the character of the blind Carmelo, played by Miguel Inclán. Likewise, the documentary maker identifies recurring thematic obsessions, connecting The Young and the Damned—with its documentary and naturalistic approach (real locations, nonprofessional actors, and inspiration from actual records)—to an earlier Buñuel work, Land Without Bread (1933), while also revealing the final resting place of Luis Buñuel's remains, whose ashes he locates at the parish of San Alberto Magno in Copilco, Mexico City.

The narration of Memory of the Forgotten is provided by director Arturo Ripstein and includes documents and interviews from the Spain Film Archive, as well as various kinds of commentary from filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michel Franco, Iván Ávila Dueñas, Fernando León de Aranoa, and Ofelia Medina; researchers Charles Tesson, Eduardo de la Vega, and Rafael Aviña; as well as Guadalupe Ferrer, Francisco Gaytán, Laura Barrera, Gabriel Figueroa Jr., TV UNAM and UNAM Film Archive directors Iván Trujillo and Hugo Villa, Elena Poniatowska, Juan Villoro, and Eduardo Vázquez, among others.

Translated by Abigail Puebla