This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

A crook on the run hooks up with a criminal gang to commit a kidnapping. However, things don't go quite as planned.

In this romance, a jilted lawyer joins the French Foreign Legion to help him forget his faithless love. While in the desert he espies a village beauty who is the exact double of his true-love.

On Christmas Eve, a manicurist pretends to be a wealthy man's daughter after meeting a young garage worker who falsely claims to own a luxury car. Their deceptions intertwine as they grow closer.

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

Following the defeat of France by Germany during WWII, two French soldiers are taken to a German farm as forced laborers.

In 1942, a French prisonner of war in Germany decide to escape to France using a cow hold by a lunge as a decoy. He cross all Germany in this way.

After dumping a bucket of water on a beautiful young woman from the window of a train car, wealthy Frenchman Mathieu, regales his fellow passengers with the story of the dysfunctional relationship between himself and the young woman in question, a fiery 19-year-old flamenco dancer named Conchita. What follows is a tale of cruelty, depravity and lies -- the very building blocks of love.

Celestine has a new job as a chambermaid for the quirky M. Monteil, his wife and her father. When the father dies, Celestine decides to quit her job and leave, but when a young girl is raped and murdered, Celestine believes that the Monteils' groundskeeper, Joseph, is guilty, and stays on in order to prove it. She uses her sexuality and the promise of marriage to get Joseph to confess -- but things do not go as planned.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.