Buñuel's first film after his Surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dali is a mock-documentary on the wretchedness of life in a remote region of Spain-mock, not in the sense that its content is not real (it is all too real, and that is the point), but in that it mocks both the documentary and its viewer, mercilessly. A deadpan voice-over narration, composed by the poet Pierre Unik, adopts the tone of a typical travelog; prospective tourists are offered glimpses of disease-ridden individuals, dying children, the mentally retarded, bees attacking a dying animal...in short, a reality that surpasses the most ingenious of Surrealism's nightmares. In its images and obsessions, the film harks back to L'Age d'or and looks forward to Los Olvidados and beyond. "The text as a whole is an example of the Surrealist doctrine of the transfiguring power of language. Here it blinds us to the evident manipulations of the montage, which Buñuel implies are identical with those of fiction films, and it consoles us with variations on how the helpless film crew could do nothing for the suffering subjects of the film." (P. Adams Sitney, in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers Vol.1).