Prisioneros de la tierra (1939)

Shot on location in the jungle, this gut-punching work of social realism by Mario Soffici—one of classic Argentine cinema’s foremost directors—simmers with rage against worker oppression. Desperate men are entrapped into indentured labor on a yerba maté plantation under the brutal foreman Köhner—a situation made tenser by the fact that both Köhner and a worker named Podeley love Andrea, the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp’s doctor, and that eventually boils over into an explosive rebellion led by Podeley. The expressionistic cinematography of Pablo Tabernero feverishly evokes a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.