Death in the Garden

A band of fugitives are forced to flee for their lives into the jungle in this subversive adventure tale from cinema's master provocateur, Luis Buñuel.

Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a band of fugitives—a roguish adventurer (Georges Marchal), a local hooker (Simone Signoret), a priest (Michel Piccoli), an aging diamond miner (Charles Vanel), and the miner’s deaf-mute daughter (Michèle Girardon)—are forced to flee for their lives into the jungle. Starving, exhausted, and stripped of their old identities, they wander desperately lured by one deceptive promise of salvation after another.

After the relatively commercial Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Luis Buñuel returned to the surrealist and political style of his earlier works with Death in the Garden [La mort en ce jardin] the middle film in what critic Raymond Durgnat described as his "revolutionary triptych", a trilogy of films that “study in the morality and tactics of armed revolution against a right-wing dictatorship”.