That Is the Dawn

In a town in Corsica, Doctor Valerio looks after the poor. His wife Angela cannot stand the place and wants to move to Nice; the doctor will not go before he has found someone to replace him. The town's largest employer is a rich industrialist, and the pressure on the people who work for him grows a little heavier every day. What happens to one of the doctor's friends forces him to pick a side. Luis Buñuel adapted the film from Emmanuel Roblès's novel, and it belongs to the work he made in France. Buñuel puts his familiar surrealist play aside here and tells a story of conscience directly: it says that staying neutral is also taking a side. It was received coldly on release and later came to be counted among the director's most moving films. Georges Marchal plays the doctor and Lucia Bosè the woman who arrives.