The Young and the Damned

In the suburbs of Mexico City in the late 1940s, Pedro is a teenager trying to escape poverty and street violence while his friendship with the juvenile delinquent Jaibo drags him toward an inevitable fate. Luis Buñuel filmed this in 1950, three years after arriving in Mexican exile, creating the most ruthless and neorealist portrayal of Latin American urban marginality of the 20th century. The film was met with scandal in Mexico and awarded at Cannes.

Buñuel at his purest Mexican period: neorealism without sentimentality and without concessions. The Young and the Damned remains the most honest portrayal of childhood in urban poverty in Latin American cinema. Dense and essential.