“I said, if I had wings of a dove I would fly away and be at rest. I would go far away and take refuge in the desert. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest. For I have seen misery and wickedness on Earth.”

Two short documentaries from different countries and from either side of the Second World War, but each connected by the unflinching way they view disenfranchised people and the lyrical and cinematic poetry used by the director in doing so. Land Without Bread, directed by Luis Buñuel, examines the poverty of the occupants of the Las Hurdes region of Spain, adopting an ironically ethnographic tone and occasionally slipping into characteristically Surreal symbolism. The House is Black, directed by Forough Farrokhzad, a female Iranian poet making her first and only film, examines the lives of the occupants of the Bababaghi Hospice leper colony. The Iranian film is far more sincere than Buñuel‘s, focusing on the deformity brought by the disease and balancing two voice overs – a male one giving sober but shocking details about the disease, and a female one reading extracts from the Koran, the Bible and Farrokhzad‘s own poetry.

The effect of these two documentaries, despite their different approaches, is the same. They are all about revelation, bringing the camera into a world that has previously gone unseen: in Buñuel‘s case depicting rural Spain as a area as remote as the heart of Africa, in Farrokhzad‘s case taking the viewer behind the closed door of the colony and then beyond. Each is a real film – neither is simply a presentation of reality. Instead each director uses the form and conventions cinema to get tot he heart of their subject matter in a way that is entirely focused on the individual.

Watch both in a triple bill with Alain Resnais’s  painful masterpiece Night and Fog (1955) for an insight into how varied documentaries can really be.