Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles

**Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles: when surrealism becomes drawing**

Paris, 1930. Luis Buñuel, with empty pockets and a head full of broken dreams, receives a proposal he can't refuse: to shoot a documentary in Las Hurdes, one of the poorest regions in Spain. What starts as a commission becomes a journey to hell —and to genius—. *Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles* (2022) is not just an animated film: it's a stark portrait of the artist in crisis, a visual experiment that mixes the harshness of neorealism with the controlled madness of his cinema.

The film, winner of the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, achieves something rare: that drawing —clean, expressive, almost naive— serves to tell an adult story, where misery, guilt, and artistic creation become entangled without concessions. There are no easy moral lessons or cardboard heroes. Buñuel appears here as he was: an obsessive, selfish, brilliant, and sometimes unbearable man, who uses the camera as a scalpel to dissect reality… or to escape from it.

The success lies in the tone. The animation, far from sweetening the drama, makes it more piercing. The turtles in the title —a symbol of his creative block— crawl across the screen as a reminder that genius, sometimes, moves at a slow pace. And the script, based on the comic by Fermín Solís, avoids the conventional biopic: there are no grand speeches, only stolen moments, cutting dialogues, and the feeling that, deep down, Buñuel never knew if he wanted to save the world or burn it.

Why does it work? Because it doesn't idealize. Because surrealism is not an intellectual game here, but a desperate cry. And because, amidst the chaos, the film finds an uncomfortable truth: art is born from pain, but also from rage. And sometimes, from a check that doesn't arrive.

A surreal journey to the heart of creativity.