Los Golfos (The Delinquents) launched the careers of two key figures of New Spanish Cinema: director Carlos Saura and producer Pere Portabella. Saura's film offers one of cinema's most distinctive portraits of Madrid, shot with a distinctive fusion of semi-documentary authenticity and lustrous stylization by Juan Julio Baena. Saura claimed that this was one of his most difficult shoots due to censorship at every stage of production. Premiered at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the film underwent several changes before this version was publicly released two years later. An ambiguous hybrid that pointed a way out of Falangist conventions, Los Golfos looks back to the city films of the silent era and evokes both the anecdotal neorealism of early Federico Fellini and the unsentimental brutality of Luis Buñuel's Mexican films (Portabella and Saura would coax Buñuel back to Spain to make Viridiana in 1961). With its interlocked narrative episodes and use of mirroring camera movements to link exterior and interior spaces, it also anticipates the formally adventurous films both Saura and Portabella would make at the end of the decade.