By Mariah Smith Jones

After viewing Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, I found the film to be an unfiltered depiction of the realities many impoverished youth face. The film effectively displayed how poverty can disassemble family structures and encourage criminality amongst those it affects, furthering systems of unreform. Los Olvidados is a Mexican film that centers on a group of impoverished and neglected youth who are caught in cycles of poverty, violence, and crime. The story primarily follows the account of Pedro, a young boy trying to leave a life of delinquency after witnessing a crime committed by ring leader Jaibo, who manipulates him into silence. Throughout the film, we see Pedro undergo a character arc as he tries to win his mother’s affection, who has grown callous towards him due to his previous dangerous behavior. Pedro transforms from a mere follower of Jaibo and the gang of boys to someone who tries to earn honest money and objects to Jaibo’s threats and advances. This prompt audiences to truly see the nuances of children like Pedro, who have been forced to grow up in a life of peer pressure for survival and stripped of the experiences that shape childhood, as seen in Pedro’s mother’s blatant neglect of him when she disregards his frequent disappearances and sends him away to a reform school. This is also similarly seen in Jaibo as he shares how he is parentless and is characterized by his detachment from those around him, viewing people as disposable, which motivates him to murder both Julian and Pedro before coming to his own untimely death. Both characters represent different extremes found in poor environments, allowing viewers to observe the nuances of why one would pursue a life of crime and how our environments shape the people we become.